Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig Page A

illusion of cosmetics and distance; it might be so.
    He walked north on Parliament and came within a few minutes into Cabbagetown – the shops along Parliament a weird jumble of discount outlets and expensive cafés, a doughnut store with the window half boarded up, a shop that sold designer pet supplies. He went into another doughnut store and got a cup of tea, warming his hands around it at a little table. Angry men were playing cards and drinking coffee, and Alex faced away from them and took pictures of their reflections in the glass.
    And it didn’t surprise him, it didn’t surprise him even a bit, that the phone rang almost as soon as he walked in the door of his apartment, while his fingers were still stiff and white with cold. It seemed like something already agreed, that it would be Susie’s voice at the other end of the line, asking him to meet her the next evening.

IV
    I own your soul now
, Alex had said, and she had seemed to believe it. She had been so young, after all, and more uncertain than he had ever realized.
    There was a day he’d been taking photographs, as the clinic escorts and the patients dashed through the gauntlet of screaming protesters, Susie-Paul holding her coat over a patient’s head as she ran, flinching as some small hard object hit her cheek. On the final sprint to the steps of the clinic, Alex slipped and fell, and cut his hand open on a rock. It wasn’t serious, but it was a dirty cut and it bled quite a bit, smears of blood on his sleeve, not what anyone needed to be looking at in the pastel waiting rooms with the twining plants. He went into the kitchen at the back of the house, where one of the staff members was making tea and a security guard was monitoring the closed-circuit camera feed, and washed his hand in the sink. He was scrubbing it under the running water, watching the red drizzle spiral down, when Susie came in with cotton and gauze.
    â€˜Let me do it for you,’ she said. She was quick and efficient about wrapping it up and taping it, but then she didn’t let go of his hand.
    â€˜You’re all right?’ she asked, and she was holding his hand in both of hers.
    â€˜Oh yeah. Nothing to it.’ He felt perfectly calm and perfectly safe, and without much thought he leaned down and kissed her forehead, and she laid her head against his chest. At that moment, he was sure, he might have put his arms around her and kissed her on the lips, but there were still facts out there – he was in a room with other people, people who were now watching them, in a place where they had to deal every day with certain extreme consequences of human behaviour, and there was blood on his shirt.
She lives with Chris
.
    He watched her through bulletproof glass as she walked down the wooden steps to the tiny yard, her boots over frozen mud while a line of protesters tossed pamphlets and plastic embryos at her head. A heavy man threw himself into an icy puddle in front of her, clutching his chest and crying, ‘Don’t kill your baby! Don’t kill yourbaby!’, his voice audible even through the thick window as Susie sidestepped him, refusing to run, walking carefully and deliberately into the alley and away.
    Susie at the pay phone up the street, biting her lip, one hand pressed against the glass. He shouldn’t have been watching her, but he was. Whoever she was talking to. He had no way of knowing.
    Susie standing on a chair in his darkroom, in the red light, a marker in her hand, writing on the walls.
    â€˜You need something in here, is all. I mean, you nearly live here, you might as well decorate.’
    â€˜It’s not even our wall. It belongs to the university paper. They’re not going to love this.’
    â€˜They can cope,’ said Susie.
Your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams
, she wrote, under a string of New Order lyrics. Alex imagined a sketch he could add. Maybe he had done it