Girls Fall Down Read Online Free PDF Page B

chest as he sat on the couch and sorted his mail with one hand, smoothing her thick fur with the other. She was clearly disinclined to move again, so he stayed on the couch for a while, wondering what to make for dinner and where he should go tonight, what he would do about the increasingly nasty weather. ‘Fat old cat,’ he muttered affectionately. ‘Dumb old thing.’
    He could go to Parkdale tonight maybe, ragged transitional Parkdale. Ten years ago, the place you didn’t dare go after dark. Now the hookers and the junkies stood on the steps of boutique hotels, and there were articles in the newspapers about the neighbourhood’s character and charm. That phase in the process could besomething to document, though of course anything could be something to document. Wherever you went there was light, there were bodies in space.
    Once Jane seemed soundly asleep, he heaved her onto the couch and stood up, heading for the kitchen. On the way, he lifted the phone and heard the rapid beeps that signalled a voice-mail message, punched in his code and listened. The person on the voice mail cleared her throat. ‘Hi, Alex.’
    Her voice was crazily, confusingly familiar, but at the same time he couldn’t put an identity to it, somehow thought for a second that it was someone he’d heard on the radio. ‘It’s been a long time,’ the voice went on, ‘but it’s Suzanne, Susie. Susie Rae.’
    â€˜We were unable to find any significant abnormalities in the blood tests performed on the young women,’ said the public health officer.
    â€˜What does that mean, significant abnormalities?’ asked the reporters at the press conference, the stand-ins for the worried city. ‘What is an insignificant abnormality?’
    â€˜We found no abnormalities that would be associated with the release of a toxic substance,’ said the public health officer.
    â€˜When you say you were unable to find them, does that mean they weren’t there?’
    â€˜It means we were unable to find them with our most sensitive tests. In practical terms, it’s as good as saying they weren’t there.’
    â€˜But it’s not the same thing.’
    â€˜It’s effectively the same thing. We don’t make absolute statements.’
    â€˜So you can’t be sure they weren’t there.’
    â€˜We can be sure that there is no cause for the public to be concerned.’
    â€˜How can you be sure of that?’
    â€˜Because we found no significant abnormalities.’
    â€˜So what kind of abnormalities did you find?’
    We are not at home in the measured world. We would prefer our safety to be an unmeasurable absolute. Not an approximation. Notthe mere knowledge that on this particular day we, unlike others, did not die, and that, if we are lucky, there is no specific reason to assume we will die tomorrow.
    Finally Alex was undone by simple curiosity, as he had known he would be. But he put it off for a while, going to work on Thursday and almost forgetting her call, coming home and spending the evening in the darkroom he had rigged up in his apartment, printing a stack of contact sheets. On Friday morning he knew that he would phone her, but he didn’t know what her schedule was. Calling her during the day seemed safer; if she had left only one number, it must be her home, and she probably wouldn’t be there in the middle of the day.
    Late in the morning he dialled up his personal voice-mail box from the phone in his office and copied down her number. Then he went out into the hallway and got a cup of coffee and drank it, came back and looked at a few more files on his computer. The number was nondescript and revealed little about her location. Probably somewhere in the east end.
    At lunchtime he went down to the cafeteria in the lobby and bought a sandwich and a bottle of juice, and then, as if it had only just occurred to him, went across to one of the