Читать книгу Girls Fall Down - Maggie Helwig - Страница 8

After one girl has fallen, the rest are explicable; they have a template, a precedent. But before that, it is harder to understand. At the beginning of this problem, then, is a single girl, the first girl to fall.

She shouldn’t have been a mystery, not even a question, this shining privileged girl with glossy hair, bright enough, well-meaning; this girl surrounded all her life with the expectation of clarity and goodness, who had collected tins of soup for the food bank, had given a talk in the school assembly about looking for the best in everyone, who had signed up to tutor an underprivileged child in math.

She had fears, of course she did, the normal kinds of fears. They read newspapers for their current affairs class, and she knew something about what went on in the world. She had dreamed for a while of the towers in New York. She hadn’t seen, on the television coverage, the people who fell or leapt from the windows, but it was all they had talked about at school, a literal incarnation of that childhood game, sitting around a flashlight at a sleepover trying to imagine whether you would rather die from burning or jumping. She knew that one war was already happening, and there might be another coming, wars in distant countries but somehow close. She drew peace signs on her notebooks, picked up flyers from leafletters by the Eaton Centre, and worried vaguely, the details unclear.

But she would not say that she fell because of this. Her account was simple – she smelled a smell like roses, then she started to feel dizzy and sick, as if she had been poisoned, and began to vomit, and didn’t feel better until she was carried into the open air on the street. She hadn’t been ill before that, she didn’t have a cold or an upset stomach, she was a healthy girl. She didn’t know about the panics on the London Underground, the rumours of cyanide. She hadn’t read the stories about what happened in Tokyo in 1995, when a group of elite sons and disaffected mathematicians decided to kick-start the apocalypse; never saw the pictures of people staggering out of the subway exits, clawing at their eyes.

So why would she imagine such a thing? Why would anyone?

The first girl who fell, on the day it began.

She had come out of school with her friends, in her kilt and tie and red wool jacket, her thigh still feeling intangibly damp where the geography teacher had put his hand on it after class.

‘Sid the Squid,’ snorted Lauren as they walked down the steps.

‘God, he’s so gross. He’s just made of gross. And his wife is a hog and a half, seriously, I mean, she weighs like a thousand pounds.’

‘She totally could sink the Titanic with her ass. I’m not kidding,’ said Tasha.

The strangeness of adults, their clenched little needs.

‘Yeah, can you imagine them in bed?’ said Lauren. ‘Oh, oh, darling, argh, I can’t breathe!’

She hated her thighs anyway, they were rounded and fat, swelling against the hard chair.

‘He’s repellent,’ said Lauren. ‘Hey, you know what, you know the Starbucks at Yonge and St. Clair is giving away free mochaccinos?’

‘No way,’ said the girl, taking a tube of pink glitter lipstick from her backpack and opening her mouth slightly to apply it. She wouldn’t stay after class anymore, not without Lauren, not without somebody. ‘No way they are.’

‘Yeah, because they had a sign in the window. But only till four.’

‘I don’t even think.’

‘Come on, then. I’ll prove you they are.’ Lauren pushed her hair back from her shoulders, and led them onto Yonge Street, into the shine and flutter of retail, the glimmering windows, people pushing past them with briefcases and plastic bags. The girl had a black canvas bag over her shoulder, with a yellow pin on it showing a rabbit holding a PEACE placard, and a pink pin that said It IS All About Me, Deal With It.

‘I just feel so cheated,’ Tasha was saying. ‘Because every year after sports day they had pizza, like every year, and then our year we just have chips and Coke. Literally like a single chip each. And you expect you’re going to have pizza, you know?’

‘I know, it’s so cheap,’ said the girl. ‘It’s like, hey, we’re saving five cents, we’re so awesome!’

‘To me it’s like a betrayal,’ said Lauren.

Starbucks really was giving away mochaccinos, and the lineup stretched halfway down the block, some of the other girls from their own school, and kids from the local high school in jeans and T-shirts, their coats slumping off their shoulders. The girl checked her reflection in the glass door, wondering fretfully if she had gained more weight, if there was a visible roll of fat at her waist. Joining the wave of young bodies, pushing and giggling. Contact in the crowd between hips, legs, the bare skin of a stranger’s arm, and she slid into the high bright relief of noise.

‘I so need caffeine right now,’ said Tasha. ‘Or I’m physically dying.’ They reached the counter, and the desperate boy pushed forward another half-dozen cups. Each of them grabbed one, pressing through the aisle towards the exit, sipping the foaming liquid, bitter and milky. Aware of the public school boys, watching them from under their messy bangs. She met the eyes of one boy, a nice-looking boy, someone she would probably never see again, and his look slid down her.

When they walked east along St. Clair they had become a group of five, Megan and Zoe joining them as well.

‘I have to write an assignment about Guinevere,’ moaned Zoe. ‘Who I just hate so much. Did you read it? She’s so unloyal. She’s like this crazy old bipolar bitch.’

‘We’re not doing that one, though, we’re doing that other one.’

‘Well, God, you’re so lucky. It’s like a million pages of poetry. It’s diseased, if you want to know.’

‘Is your class raising money for the global, the African thing?’

‘I think. But I’m not sure what we’re doing yet.’

The girl adjusted the gold barrettes in her hair with one hand, rolled up her skirt so that it brushed high on her legs, her bare skin goosebumped with cold, thinking about the boy from the public school, with a vague distaste and a wish that he would follow them. He might have been a nice boy.

‘What I think, we need to have a slave auction,’ Zoe was saying. ‘Because it’s so the best kind of fundraiser.’

‘We should make the teachers be the slaves,’ said Megan, giggling. ‘We should make Mr. Sondstrom be a slave. We so should.’

The girl frowned and wiped mochaccino from her pink lips, swallowing against the heat in her throat. ‘Mr. Sondstrom’s too gross to be a slave even,’ she said. Megan didn’t know. It wasn’t her fault. ‘He’s just a squid. Sid the Squid.’

‘Totally,’ said Lauren, bumping her shoulder supportively. The girl finished her mochaccino, crushed the paper cup in her hand.

Turning off St. Clair, they walked past the frost-brown gardens of the residential streets, wet leaves in the gutters, heading towards Chorley Park, where there were boys playing soccer sometimes, or sometimes they would just sit on the benches and talk, their park, their place.

‘But I’m going to the Eaton Centre later on,’ said Megan. ‘I need a new pair of shoes so bad. It’s a critical situation.’

‘You know the place called Rebels? They have the best shoes.’

‘Megan buys her shoes at Sears,’ said Tasha.

‘I do not, you liar.’ Megan, a year younger than the others, her position in the group subject to question.

‘You totally do.’

‘Oh God,’ Zoe broke in, laughing nervously. ‘I have to tell you about my brother. I have to tell you about my psycho brother, okay? I mean, he’s got all these, like, warfare scenes in his bedroom, like, the little guys with their spears and shit. Which is spaz enough, right? But he’s now he’s like, okay, it’s, like, this warfare is all over, it’s modern times, and I’m going to do a terror gas attack, and kill them all. And I’m like, God! They’re a bunch of toys! But he’s, no, I’m gonna make a poison chemical from like Clorox and bleach and I’m gonna kill everybody, and I’m like, it’s a toy, Jordan, you mutant.’

‘God,’ said the girl, rolling her eyes. ‘That is so random.’

‘’Cause he’s like, it happened in, in the Japan subway, and all these people died, so he’s like, I can totally do this at home.’

‘What happened in Japan?’ asked Tasha, her eyebrows pinched.

Zoe shrugged. ‘I dunno. Terrorists or whatever. Jordan’s like Mutato-Boy, so, I mean, what does he know about it? I bet he dreamed the whole thing.’

‘Would you believe,’ said the girl, ‘when I was a kid I was in that big subway crash at Dupont? Oh God, that was so scary.’

‘Oh my God! You were really?’ gasped Lauren, and the girl’s face shone with gratified horror.

‘I totally was,’ she said. ‘I nearly died.’

‘Oh my God! That must have been so traumatic!’

‘Seriously,’ said the girl; though in truth her memories were vague, barely existing at all. There had been smoke, at some point – when she was being taken out of the car, there had been smoke. Before that she had been pressed against her mother, and there was some other woman pushing against her from the other side, and that woman was wearing too much perfume, floral, clotting in her throat. The lights had gone out.

‘No, but I think monkeys are more morally superior than people,’ Zoe was saying. ‘Because monkeys don’t use, like, landmines and stuff, do they?’

‘Unless they were really horrible monkeys,’ said Tasha, and then they were at the park.

‘Well,’ said Lauren. ‘This is pretty random.’

And what happened in the green space of the park was something the girl didn’t much want to talk about.