It occurred to the girl that she could phone Zoe, but she knew that she wouldn’t, that she could never explain to Zoe what had happened, or what it had felt like, in that moment, to fall. She thought again about the woods at the back of the school grounds, the thicker woods deep in the ravines, about living out in the cold there, how dark it got.
‘That new science teacher? He’s a total babe,’ said Kirsty.
II
‘And that’s supposed to mean fucking what now?’
Alex bent over his contact sheets, biting his lip and trying hard not to listen to Chris and Susie, who were shouting at each other a foot away from him.
‘Look, don’t ask me, ask your boy toy Mike out there if you want to know. As if you really don’t know.’
That summer in 1989 the air was heavy with humidity, and the production room had somehow ceased to be public space, had turned into a heat-charged theatre for this escalating drama, everyone’s lives invaded by it. Alex could never be sure who he would find there or what would be happening, how long it would take to get an issue out and what would be torn or broken in the interim, Chris and Susie refined into their worst possible selves, insulting each other in front of the staff, staging petty battles, destroying small prized possessions. They had never seemed so close as they tore each other slowly to pieces, passionate and obsessive, no one else around them more than a stage prop. And even then they would go home together at sunrise, come back to the office for the next evening’s work. Return to their apartment, to whatever happened between them there.
Alex walked through it, quiet, an outsider, except that she would be there in his darkroom, she would touch him and lean on his shoulder and then suddenly leave; she would call him at midnight, meet him in a bar in the Market and tell him everything, and the next day he would be no one again.
He came to the office late at night, and he was in the parking lot, chaining up his bicycle, when he heard Susie-Paul crying in the darkness. He ran towards the sound, and saw the small outline of her, huddled by the wall, at the edge of the spill of a street light, barely visible.
‘Susie. Susie.’
She looked up, a streak of something dark and wet on her face, and a splayed mass at her feet. Lifted her hands. He saw the shine of the edge of a knife, a heavy liquid on her fingers.
He was on his knees beside her instantly, his feet tangling into the mess of Chris’s bicycle beside her, the tires slashed, the chain ripped off. She was covered with the oil from the chain. And he knew that he would have forgiven her anything, anything at all, there was nothing she could do that he had not in advance forgiven.
‘Susie.’
He pulled her into his arms, and she came, smearing oil in his hair, on his neck, the exacto knife falling to the ground.
‘I killed his bike,’ she said.
He kissed her then, really kissed her for the first time, their tongues pressing hard into each other’s mouths. They fell together in the shadow of the wall, the hot asphalt scraping his knees, her body moving against his, their legs entangled. But she slid away from him. She pulled herself up and staggered backwards, tugging down her dress, her lips swollen.
‘I can’t. Alex, no. I can’t do this right now.’
He sat on the asphalt breathing hard, smelling of WD-40. He wanted to say something ugly and childish – you could do it with Mike Cherniak – and it wasn’t love or kindness or even common sense that prevented him, just inarticulacy. But this too he had forgiven her, had forgiven her long ago. There was nothing else he could do. He was helpless.
There was no particular reason that Alex painted a giant bird across one wall of his room. He had been very bored one evening, and he had paint and brushes still lying around from his short-lived experiment with art school a few years before.
‘Is it a phoenix, then?’ asked Adrian.
‘No. It’s just a bird.’
‘Bird of prey? Migratory bird? Pelican? The pelican is Jesus, you know. Though if I were Jesus I might be offended by that. Well, obviously it’s not a pelican.’
‘I don’t know. It’s a bird. It looks like a fierce bird.’
‘I think it’s an osprey.’
‘If you say so. I was just thinking Jane would like to have a permanent bird to chase, but this one’s awfully big. I don’t think her visual field is up to it.’
‘There’s not a wide symbolic network around the osprey. I wonder why that is.’
‘I’m thinking now I could make Jane a little bird mobile, but it wouldn’t last long.’
It was a white bird with black and brown edging on its feathers, and a jagged turquoise line marking it off from the grey concrete wall, and it was somewhat larger than Alex himself. He didn’t much like it; there was nothing in it that was original or real. He’d never had the right kind of eye to be a painter.
‘What would you do for me?’ Susie said. She was lying on his bed, wearing a white lace dress and black tights with runs in them, smoking hash, and Alex was stretched on the floor, leaning his head against the mattress. He could hear Queen Jane growling in the far corner of the room, doing battle with a sock. ‘If I asked you. What would you do for me?’
‘Anything,’ he said. He didn’t know why she was there, she had turned up at his door, it happened sometimes. He didn’t ask.
‘But that’s not true,’ she said, exhaling and handing him the joint. ‘You wouldn’t kill somebody, for instance. And that’s good, I mean, I wouldn’t want that. But really. What would you do?’
I would sit here for hours and never touch you, he thought, sucking the smoke into his lungs. I would let you pull me towards you and then push me away again. What more do you want?
He held the smoke in for as long he could before exhaling, leaned his elbow on the mattress and looked at her, a distant and slightly mad expression on her face that was not just the hash. He could see the dark lashes surrounding her bottomless eyes; he was close enough to count every one of them.
‘I would stop taking photographs,’ he said.
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘I think I would.’ He passed the joint to her. ‘Do you want me to?’
‘No.’ She took a long drag, and a slow trail of smoke spun out from her lips in a complex spiral. ‘If I was very sick, if I needed someone to look after me, would you do it?’
He lay his head on the mattress, pushing his hair from his face. Patterns of light from the cars that passed outside shimmered across the wall. ‘Sure. I guess. I’m not a doctor.’
‘Not like that.’ She stared at the ceiling. ‘What if – what if I was sick in a way that changed me? If I wasn’t the person you knew. Would you still look after me then?’
‘But that won’t happen.’
She closed her eyes. He sucked the last of the smoke from the roach and dropped it into an ashtray. Her hair in the light of his desk lamp was a hundred shades of pink and gold.
‘You’ll always be Susie-Paul,’ he said. She shook her head slowly. ‘I know who you are. I will always know who you are.’
‘You don’t know, Alex,’ she whispered. ‘You don’t understand.’
He felt a faint creep of apprehension. ‘Is there – Susie, is something wrong?’
‘No. Nothing’s wrong. Not with me.’
She lay with her eyes closed for what was probably a long time.
‘You still want to go hear the Spits?’ she asked at last.
‘If you do,’ he said.
‘Sure. Let’s.’
They walked up Bathurst Street in a cutting November wind, icy puddles soaking in through his boots. She was very quiet, and he knew that he had let her down in some way, but he didn’t know what he could say to make it better.