Girls Fall Down Read Free Page B

to be more curious, he thought, when a thing like this happened. You could speculate, now and then, on just how you’d react to a genuinely important incident, but really what you did, it seemed, was to incorporate it almost instantly into the flow of daily life – the way he had gone on with his routine the day the planes flew into the buildings in New York, the way he had gone from his errand at the bank to his office at the hospital, hadspent most of the day at his computer, and forgotten for minutes at a time that anything was wrong. The way you could spend the afternoon in what might perfectly well have been a poison gas attack, check your skin casually for a rash, and not bother with the radio. As long as no one you knew was hurt or sick, you were at least as interested in hearing about a girl you thought you were in love with fifteen years ago.
    He wondered if she still called herself Susie-Paul. Probably not. It sounded like she was using Suzanne now. Suzanne Paulina Rae.
    He chewed on the bagel and the sharp crumbling cheddar, mopping up the insulin before his blood sugar dropped too low, the intricate dance of chemical balance that he could never ignore, never leave to run automatically as most people did.
    There was a photograph he sometimes came across, loose among his files, not properly stored and catalogued like the others because it wasn’t one he’d taken himself. A loose colour print of a dozen people, arranged against the wall of the newspaper office, all of them in their twenties, clear-eyed, effortlessly beautiful. Susie-Paul and Chris were well into the final disintegration of their relationship by then, the paper nearly as far along the road to its own collapse, and the people in the photograph were each in their various ways tense, unhappy, embarrassed. Adrian, who was by no stretch of the imagination a member of staff, had been installed on the sagging couch between Susie and Chris as a kind of human Green Line; he was frowning and adjusting his glasses, one sneakered foot curled up on the cushion beside him. Chris, in a heavy sweater and corduroys, faced the camera down, his face hurt and determined under a forced smile. Susie was looking away, apparently speaking to someone. She was wearing a little flowered sundress over a pair of jeans, and a torn brown leather bomber jacket; her hair, in a feathery bob, was dyed a startling pink, the camera emphasizing her large dark eyes.
    Looking out of the frame, he thought. As if there were someone beyond the picture who had a claim on her attention, more than any of the people around her. It had always been that way.
    And far over to the other side was Alex, the rarely photographed photographer, a slender young man in black jeans and a black cottonshirt, staring down at the floor, long sand-coloured hair falling over his face like a screen. Adrian probably assumed that Alex and Susie-Paul had been sleeping together when the photo was taken; a number of people believed this, it was one of the generally accepted reasons for Chris and Susie’s rather noisy and public breakup and the subsequent failure of the paper. Alex couldn’t remember now who had taken that picture – it didn’t look like a professional shot – but whoever it was, they or the camera had been more perceptive, had understood that Alex’s real position was then, as ever, at the margin, a half-observed watcher of the greater dramas.
    I don’t know, said the girl, lying on a cot in the hospital, her legs covered with a sheet. I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I don’t know.
    They had been doing nothing, her friends said, talking to the doctors in the hallway. They went to Starbucks. They walked in the park. They got on the subway and then she said she was sick, and they thought maybe there was a funny smell, and she said yes, there was this rose kind of smell, but she was too sick to tell them much, and then the other one fell down as well,