Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig Page A

this could work.’
    â€˜I can see it during the day. When things are open. It’s not exactly picturesque, but retail’s part of the urban experience, I get that. But retail that’s closed for the night?’
    â€˜Just let me see what I can do.’ They passed from one corridor into the next, walking by a man with an industrial bucket mop talking in animated French to a woman with cornrowed blonde hair and hoop earrings, and came out into a shuttered food court. ‘I like this.
    The bones of the food court. Infrastructure,’ muttered Alex, moving around the kiosks, kneeling, adjusting the lens. The light was dim, but it wasn’t too dark, not so dark that he couldn’t adapt.
    â€˜It’s interesting, the shape of things down here,’ he went on, a kind of half-conscious patter, not exactly meant to be listened to. ‘I mean, up on the surface the city’s so rectilinear, but down here it’s like this wild kind of maze. And they put up these signs … ’ he stepped back to take a picture of one of the glyphic, colour-coded signs that hung from the ceiling ‘… that make no damn sense at all, these weird triangles. I wonder about it.’
    â€˜They disorient people so they’ll feel insecure and purchase more. Try to locate themselves through merchandise.’
    â€˜Maybe. I don’t know.’
    In the next hallway there was music from a PA system, a woman in the uniform of one of the food court restaurants talking on her cellphone. A man walking by with a red balloon on a string.
    â€˜Let’s go up this way,’ said Alex, gesturing towards a steep elevator, and as they rode up he tipped his head back in astonishment.
    â€˜Oh, look,’ he said. ‘Oh, this is lovely.’
    They were in a long hallway, with a high ceiling of white ribs, arching in a luminous cathedral curve above the darkened space, and set into the floor were panels of light, glowing in the dim surround. Alex knelt on the floor and leaned back, holding the camera upwards, almost lying down on the tile, then moved in a quick shuffle to the side, trying to hold the glowing panels and the arch in a single shot. ‘Isn’t this lovely?’
    Susie was standing with her arms folded, half smiling. ‘It’s a
bank
, Alex,’ she said.
    â€˜So?’
    â€˜So? So it’s a bank. So this is just money trying to look good.’
    Alex walked to the glass wall at the end of the hallway, seeing that they had returned to street level, and squinting out towards the street. He could barely make out a sheer black cone, slick with wet snow, and the angular glass edges of the facing building, and he took a series of shots, working on intuition, hoping that the tangle of reflections would come out the way he wanted it to. ‘I say again –so? People made this. They thought it would be beautiful, so they made it.’
    â€˜You’re very easy to impress.’
    â€˜Maybe so. But that’s a choice too.’
    A small child ran onto one of the light panels, screaming in delight as his father ran after him, dodging and chasing in the scattered darkness, and Alex stopped thinking in concepts as he raised the camera, his fingers moving as he shifted the pictures around, framing, needing, taking in the shapes of their play, before they went down again to the underground passageways.
    Some of the corridors were suddenly full of people, walking north from Union Station and branching off to the east or west at different points along the route. They passed Yogen Früz stands, candy stores with piles of maple fudge in the windows, shops that sold bottles of vitamins, or silk scarves and mittens, shuttered and dark. Into another underground courtyard, white marble, with banks of ferns and violets and tiny willow trees, a small waterfall at one end with the twisted copper shapes of salmon leaping in front of it. His feet were starting to ache; he sat down on