Girls Fall Down by Maggie Helwig Page B

the small stairway between the ferns, thinking that if he were by himself he could take his shoes off.
    â€˜Where else have you done this?’ asked Susie, sitting beside him.
    â€˜Oh, everywhere.’ He wiggled his toes and rotated his ankles, keeping the circulation going. ‘I mostly concentrate on the downtown, but everywhere I can get to, really. People think urban photography is all big-eyed kids in housing projects. Which, I mean, yeah, housing projects are part of it too. And police stations and stuff. But so is this … ’ he waved his arm around, ‘… this whatever. Is this a hotel?’
    â€˜I can’t even tell. It’s all much the same down here.’
    They sat on the steps in silence for a few minutes.
    â€˜How long were you in Vancouver?’ asked Alex.
    Susie took a breath before she answered, and looked down. ‘A year? A year and a half, I think.’
    â€˜Ah.’ He held his camera on his lap, fidgeting with the lens. And he knew that she was aware of the same thing, that she had been back in Toronto for over ten years, and she hadn’t talked to him. She talked to Adrian. Not to him.
    He reached over and rubbed the leaf of the violet beside him, thinking he would find that it was plastic, but it wasn’t, it was real.
    â€˜Adrian and Evvy got married, you know,’ Susie said at last.
    It took him a minute to place the name – yes, Evelyn Sinclair, the very quiet and faintly mysterious theology student that Adrian had been with, in some uncertain way, all those years ago. ‘Huh.’ He hadn’t expected that. ‘Well, I’m glad things work out for some people. They have any kids?’
    â€˜One.’ She looked over at Alex. ‘How about you? You married or anything?’
    â€˜Nah.’ He rotated his ankles again. ‘Came close to it once, I guess. But it didn’t happen. Basically I stick with my cat.’
    â€˜Not the same cat, surely.’
    â€˜Oh yeah. She’s very old now, but she’s still around. She’s like my life partner. What about you? Married?’
    â€˜Was for a bit. Not anymore. It wasn’t a good idea.’
    â€˜Anyone I know?’
    â€˜Nope.’
    Alex stood up. ‘Okay. We’ve been in retail long enough. Let’s check out Metro Hall and call it done.’
    This meant another series of corridors, and a brief emergence into the damp clatter of the St. Andrew subway station, before they reached an orange hallway where the air was indefinably different, where there were no shops on either side. In the corner two figures lay rolled up in dirty sleeping bags on the tile floor, food wrappers scattered around them.
    â€˜See, this I understand,’ said Susie. ‘We’ve moved from retail space to civic space now. It’s a less censored environment. Inclusive.’
    Alex lifted his camera. He shouldn’t do this, shouldn’t photograph homeless people who were asleep, helpless to give permission, but his cannibal eye demanded the picture, and he didn’t really try to resist. They walked into another hallway, a glass wall down the left side; he knew there was a sunken pool outside, surrounded by granite boulders and pine trees, a tiny replica of the Canadian Shield down below ground level, but at night there was nothing visible, only thick black beyond the glass. Up a spiral stairway, and another man in asmall foyer just a few feet from the cold, asleep sitting up, a grey blanket draped over his shoulders. Susie shrugged on her coat and pushed the door open, and then they were out in the wind.
    The snow had stopped, leaving a sugared dust drifting and whirling across the pavement as they stepped outside. Alex squeezed his eyes closed and opened them again, not quite able to move forward until he had grown used to the dark, hoping that Susie wouldn’t notice this.
    â€˜So you’re finished?’
    â€˜I guess so.