Girls Fall Down (23 page)

‘Isn't that a bit funny?' asked Alex, slipping into the kind of easy patter he used with teenage patients. ‘A mouse with a pet ferret?'

Mouse grinned and chewed a loose bit of her hair. ‘I know a girl called Kat who has a hedgehog, what about that?'

‘A pet hedgehog?'

‘Yeah, but it kinda sucks as a pet. It can't cuddle you or nothing. And it's not very friendly. Actually it's kinda mean. It really brings Kat down sometimes.'

‘Maybe she needs a better pet.'

‘Well, she don't want to give up on this hedgehog. She thinks it can, you know, rehabilitate.'

He was focused now, working, and happy, and not even too bothered by the floaters, which were definitely diminishing, and then
he heard the thud of the wooden door. Susie was partway into the hall, unwinding her scarf, when she saw him, and stood still for a second before she walked towards him.

‘I was just leaving,' said Alex.

‘Are you sure?'

‘I think so, I think I should go.' ‘I need to do some interviews, but if you could wait a little while … '

He knew if he looked at her eyes he was lost. But really, he was pretty much lost anyway. He shrugged. ‘I guess I could wait.'

He took some more photos while Adrian and Evvy and a few others folded the legs of the tables and stacked them up, lay down mattresses, rolled out the
TV
. The movie was something about a comet destroying all life on earth, and the general level of interest seemed low, though Mouse said that there was a really excellent tidal wave later on, and the woman there died, and it was very sad and she'd cried like anything.

‘The fire next time,' said Evelyn.

‘Nah,' said Adrian. ‘
Men in Black II
next time.'

Susie had set up a couple of chairs in the corner, and now and then he heard scraps of conversation. How many friends in this place, in that place. Would you say they were close friends? What kind of thing do they help you with, do you help them with? What word would you use to describe your relationship?

Adrian squatted down on the floor beside him while he was packing up his camera. ‘Did you know Suzanne was coming?' he asked.

‘No.'

‘Is it okay?'

‘It was a very long time ago,' said Alex, which was such a blatant lie he could hardly imagine anyone believing it.

‘If you say so.' Adrian stood up. ‘I guess I should see if I'm needed somewhere.'

He should have told Adrian about the floaters. He could have told him that at least.

Susie crossed the room towards Evelyn, and they spoke for a minute with their heads close together, and then Evelyn stepped back
and laughed, and moved in a quick twirling step that made Alex think of her dancing. He tried to remember when he had seen her dance. Susie hugged Evvy lightly, and looked over at Alex, and he picked up his bag and came to her.

They went outside, into a wind that was very strong now. ‘I have to remember to call you Suzanne,' said Alex.

‘You don't really.' She played with the fringe of her scarf, and the wind blew her hair across her face, obscuring her expression.

‘So did you, did you get that paper finished?'

‘Well, it's not like – it takes longer than that. I, ah, I did some work on it, I guess.'

They stopped walking at the same time, and then he took hold of her and kissed her, pressing her against the wall of a bus shelter, half angry, half desperate, her hands gripping his arms. He didn't consciously think that her mouth no longer tasted of hangover and bad sleep, but he took in the sugar trace on her lips and the smell of her breath. Reese's peanut butter cups, a small cheap treat for herself, bought at the 7-Eleven or the newsstand in the subway. An innocent, silly thing.

She had no mittens, and she was walking along the street blowing on her hands. He wanted her to be inside, somewhere warm. They ended up at the Kos Diner, piling their layers of heavy outdoor clothes on empty chairs; it seemed obvious that she was coming back to his apartment, but somehow he couldn't say this, neither one of them wanting to take a step they couldn't reverse. Susie ordered a coffee and french fries. Her hair, loose and disarranged, seemed to be a slightly different colour, a bit more golden.

‘I found a magic star last night,' he said. ‘But Adrian tells me it has a mafia connection.' He told her about the restaurant and the flock of balloons, trying to make it sound entertaining rather than grim, wanting her to smile.

‘Do you suppose it's a sign of some kind?' she said, shaking a blob of ketchup onto her plate.

‘Gotta be.'

Susie dipped a french fry into the ketchup and sighed. ‘Derek sent me a letter,' she said. She reached into her shoulder bag and took out
two ragged pieces of notebook paper covered with tiny dense handwriting. ‘The street nurses gave it to me.'

‘Is this good or bad?'

‘I'm really not sure.'

Alex moved his hand towards the letter and looked at her, and she nodded, so he pulled the papers over to his side of the table. The script was slanted, rushing forward on the page so that words ended up on top of other words, lines snaking up and down the margins. There seemed to be no salutation, nor anything resembling the beginning of a thought.

i was talking to the doctor that time and he said have you thought about your hostelity, I could use the help. because the hired help, yes they do, the hired, the hived, the halt, the lame, they are always helping. okay that was not my point. so he said that about the hostile and i said, what the fucking shit, i can get hostile on your ass if you keep going on about it. so he fucked me up the ass that's all the doctors do every day they're back at it. i was bleeding from my anal passage because of the fucking of the doctors and that's why I got the cancer in there and my penis also.

but you find a safe place and be in it. because the sodium pentothal and others you may not beawar of, hypnium oxygenatium and also wood alcohol derivatives as such. this is why the kalorie intake. you see it is kalorie, not calorie as they tell you, kallos = beautiful but it's a risk you take. but you find a safe place.

baby sister we were born together in one bloody body and they say it isn't the same dna but that's a lie, on top of me and because they say we are not, no no, go away, but i look after you. they tried to do it again to you but i put my mysterious protection in place. you are very beautiful susie-paul. i will make it all right.

not even to get into the subject of the suicide missions they are asking me to undertake, but i say, no, we are not going in that direction. to the undertaker ha ha. all in little pieces. with involvement of the following persons, mr kofi annan, mr vladimir putin = whore, mrs margaret thatcher + tony blair, mr president of the united stated union of holy matrimony which is to say fucking in the bleeding orifices. the oval orifice. ha ha ha.

but it's not my point okay okay. but only if you would come here and stay with me. that would be better.

once upon a time there was a little girl. and the birds ate up her eyes. but she lives happily ever after at the end, this is my mystery power.

but stopping the crying is a problem of our time, he cries too much.

There was more, but Alex couldn't keep reading. He turned the papers over in his hands and briefly thought that he might cry himself, watching Susie eating her french fries, eyes on her plate.

‘He spends a lot of time writing,' she said. ‘This is on the coherent side.'

Alex slid the papers across the table. ‘He's in love with you,' he said quietly.

Susie shrugged. ‘That's not the form of words I'd choose to describe it. I'd say I'm the focus of a lot of his obsessions. But I don't know. Maybe that's not much different from what normal people mean by love.' She pushed back her hair, and Alex bit his lower lip. ‘He wants me in there with him, you know. I mean, not so much in the tent or wherever. In his world. With the plots and the brainwashing chemicals, inside that system. I even feel guilty sometimes that I'm not.'

‘Oh God. Susie.' He wasn't sure it was the right thing to do, given the conversation up to that point, but he reached across the table for her hand. She moved away, in what might have been an accidental gesture, and he took a french fry from her plate instead.

‘But I'm not inside it, am I? And poor Derek's not my bad angel. I have my own ordinary failures, and that's a big thing, really. People don't know.'

There was nothing he could say – there was nothing he could do, short of kneeling and putting his head in her lap – so he said nothing. A flicker crossed the path of his sight, and he moved his head, and caught himself making a brushing motion at one of the floaters. She noticed the gesture, but she didn't know what it meant, it had no implications for her.
My eyes are bleeding.

‘Anyway. What's the news in your life, aside from magic stars?'

‘Nothing much. Day-to-day stuff at the hospital.'

My eyes are bleeding because of you.

‘I don't want to keep you if you're busy.'

‘No. I'm not.' He watched the shifting highlights in her hair and wondered how long he would be able to see them. That was the kind of detail he might lose. ‘I got a good run of photos at the church.'

They sat without speaking for a while, Susie eating her fries with her fingers.

‘I'd like to photograph you sometime,' he said.

‘You already have. A bunch of times.'

‘Yeah, but ages ago.'

Slowly, Alex was becoming aware of noises behind them. Voices at another table growing louder and more agitated.

‘Come on. I know you were taking pictures of me last week.' He shrugged; it was true, though he'd been only half aware of it at the time. Susie in the darkness of the Cloud Gardens, looking at the ground. ‘But I mean properly.'

‘Yeah, okay. Sometime.'

He saw movement, real movement, not black spots, from the corner of his eye, and heard a woman's voice, high and scared, saying something about roses. ‘Oh man,' he said, and turned his head in time to see her – in her thirties probably, in a furry green coat – crash heavily to the ground beside the door. Alex stood up from the table.

‘Shit,' said Susie, and they both started to move towards the woman, but half a dozen other people had already reached her. As someone tried to lift her up, she vomited onto the floor, splashing her coat and a man's shoes. Alex heard her saying the word poison, the word terrorist.

‘Let's just go,' he said. Another man was clinging to a table, his heavy shoulders hunched over as if he were barely supporting himself, red blotches appearing on his face. But Susie's expression was lit up with professional fascination. ‘Oh no,' she said, excited. ‘I have to stay, I have to watch this.'

An ambulance had already arrived, then a fire truck. Two more people were sitting on the floor holding their heads. The paramedics were wearing masks that covered their faces, blue gowns over their uniforms and green plastic gloves, and they lifted the woman
carefully to her feet. She staggered and fell against one of them, and he turned his head to the side as he held her up. Strips of bacon, neglected on the grill, began to shrivel and blacken, harsh smoke curling into the air around the counter.

‘This is really, really interesting,' said Susie, moving closer to the centre of activity.

The paramedics led the woman and the blotched man out of the restaurant, the firemen passing oxygen masks out among the crowd. The scorched bacon was spitting fat, and Alex felt a heave of nausea. A dark-haired waitress ran back behind the counter and scraped the strips of bacon off, tossing them into the sink. The deep fryer and the coffee maker were smoking as well, she turned them off, unplugged the coffee maker and threw it hastily into the sink. Susie moved back a step, took Alex's arm and pulled him forward. He put one hand over his mouth, thinking he was about to be sick, a horribly familiar smell of burned meat in his nostrils.

‘Here's what I want to know,' she whispered. ‘Do the
ERTS
think this is a poison gas? What procedures are they employing for these incidents?'

‘I just don't want to be taken in for decontamination or whatever.'

‘See, look at this, the medics have the masks but the firefighters don't, and that doesn't make rational sense. But it's like … they have a kind of ambiguous response to this. Like it's, hmm, liminal between real and imaginary, you know?'

A fireman stretched an oxygen mask towards them, but Alex waved it away. He was afraid that Susie was going to put on a choking fit in order to get into one of the ambulances – there were two outside now – but she was busy with her clipboard and pen. Police cars pulled up at the curb, and then everyone inside the restaurant was being led out, standing for one shocking moment outside without coats, pressing against the wall for shelter.

‘They're not sure what they're doing,' said Susie. ‘A lot of this is improvised.' Policemen began coming out with armloads of winter clothes, purses and bags, dumping them on the sidewalk. He pulled his coat on, and his scarf, but he couldn't find his hat. Susie had brought her bag outside with her, but she still had no coat, was
hunched over and windblown, scribbling notes. A heavy man leaning against the wall seemed to have a nosebleed; he was clutching a wad of bloody tissue to his face, his mouth wide open. A cyclist with dreadlocked hair rounded the corner, staring at the crowd as he passed, and shouted, ‘Valium! Take Valium!' as he sped into the darkness along College.

‘Susie. Aren't you freezing?'

‘Just a second.' She wrote another sentence, then bent down to a pile of clothes on the sidewalk and tugged her coat out. The woman who had fallen was being lifted into the ambulance.