Annabel (26 page)

26

The Battery

T
HE CITY GREW OPPRESSIVE.
If it was not formal wear in the Model Shop that disturbed Wayne, with its bridesmaid gowns and tuxedos that reminded him of the travesty of his own prom, it was the homeless people. He felt quizzical gazes from them, as if they recognized something in him. He had expected to have more time than he had to get used to the changes in his body. But his body jumped at the chance to become less like a man and more like a woman. When he had been reducing the pills for just one week, he felt tenderness in his breasts and he felt them start to swell, as if they had been constrained but were now able to expand. In the course of a normal day he had little cause to speak to anyone, except to pass a quick hello to a customer or answer Frank King a simple yes or no about the sale of a box of sausages, but he became conscious of a change in his voice. It cracked the way it had done when he was fourteen, and sometimes when he tried to speak, it was a false start and no voice came, then he had to take a breath and speak with what seemed like unnatural force for his voice to come out at all.

Wayne looked into the polished marble of the Bank of Montreal and saw a soft shadow with hair that blew around his face like a girl’s hair. He could be a girl in a mirror like that, a surface of polished stone. But in a real mirror what was he?

Part of him wished for the safety of Croydon Harbour, but was it safety? His father had intimated that it was not. Yet St. John’s was all angles. It was corners and intersections and panes of glass, and every time he passed through one of its clearly defined spaces he felt he did not fit into it. His body, or the idea of his body, had grown amorphous and huge.

There was one place in St. John’s whose wildness did something good for Wayne: the Battery. He visited it because he remembered that kid in Caines Grocery, Steve Keating, saying he would like it. You could walk between its higgledy-piggledy houses and through the outer Battery and around the Signal Hill trail. Or you could stay in the middle Battery and look at the houses that were built like boats, and you could look down on the water and see the ships and the harbour-pilot tugs leading them in. The Battery was, like himself, part one thing and part another. It was pure city, shambling from the downtown core into the main chambers of the heart, the harbour, of St. John’s, its houses part of the lining of the womb of the port city. But it was also like a tiny coastal community. It was unregulated, much of it without plumbing, as Mr. Caines had said; full of kittens and youngsters that no one claimed to own much of the time. A garden, or more likely a scrap of vetch and boulder, was as likely to be festooned with the week’s sheets and long johns as with strings of lanterns or beer bottles lined up in the sun. The Battery was the domain of pigeons and gulls, and the houses and fish sheds nearest the harbour stood on half-rotted stilts awash with weeds. At night, no one in the imposing merchants’ quarter of St. John’s had the enchanted view owned by the youths who hung around the wharf drinking: lights of ships from Portugal, Poland, Spain, and Russia floated like a sparkling dream. If a ship had a rusting hulk or held a starving stowaway, none of that mattered in the night. The night on the Battery was a necklace of floating light, a world of dreams, part city and part ocean, a hybrid, like Wayne himself, between the ordinary world and that place in the margins where the mysterious and undefined breathes and lives.

Wayne walked there at night just to look at the lights and did not talk to the youths who drank on the wharf under the lower Battery. There was a store called Jack’s Corner Shop on the corner of Duckworth Street and the lower Battery, where old men loitered smoking their cigarettes. It was in that shop, as he bought two hot dogs for eighty-nine cents from the machine with silver rollers that made the wieners look more delicious than they were, that Wayne met Steve Keating fetching a tin of Carnation milk for his mother.

“Hey! You’re that guy I met in Caines. Are you?” Steve Keating peered into Wayne’s sweatshirt hood.

At work Frank King had already expressed doubt about Wayne’s changing appearance. In fact he had told Wayne he had better clean himself up in the next week or Frank would have to take him aside. “You’re preoccupied,” Frank had bellowed. “You’re not energetic. A person can hardly hear you.” Frank had stepped back to get a better perspective. Wayne’s eyes held something that looked to Frank King as if it had gone through the end of wrong or right and come out another side. “You are not projecting an air of confidence, my friend. I don’t know how you have sold any meat at all.” It was true that some of Wayne’s customers had stopped ordering from him. He had begun making deliveries later in the day so that the bulk of them would happen in darkness, just as he had told his father he might have to do.

“You look different,” Steve Keating said now. “But you’ve got the same boots on and the same jacket, and the way you walk is just the same. Do you want to go look in Katie Twomey’s front window? I can show you the waterfall in her house.”

They walked the lower Battery and Steve went in his own house and gave his mother the tin of milk while Wayne waited outside. Steve’s house was a cream-coloured bungalow with two tiny windows, and below it was scraggly rock that led down to the wharf where the youths hung around. Wayne saw them look at him, sodium vapour lights from the harbourfront lighting their faces orange. They were older than Steve. When Steve came back out, one called up, “Hey! Keating! Who you got there?”

“Never mind him,” Steve said. “That’s only Derek Warford. Come on.” He started back up the hill. “I’ll show you Katie Twomey’s private waterfall.”

“Hey!” Derek Warford shouted. “Keating! Answer me when I ask you something, you little fucker.”

“Wait here,” Steve told Wayne, and he went down to where Derek Warford had started walking uphill. Wayne waited. He did not want to go down there and have Derek Warford look too closely at him. He saw Steve talk to Derek Warford, then hand him money, and Warford went to the wharf and took three beer out of a case and gave them to Steve.

“Here.” Steve handed Wayne a bottle.

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him you were looking for Archibald White’s house.”

“Who’s Archibald White?”

“Archibald White is an English professor who built that blue mansion up by the Battery Hotel. I told Warford you were lost and I was showing you how to get there.”

“Why did you tell him that?”

“So he wouldn’t bother us. Come on.”

They went up a staircase and behind some gardens until they came to a house with no lights on. There was a scrap of bare veranda and Steve sat on it, opened a beer, and began to drink it. He made no effort to look in the window or try to show Wayne what was inside. It was one of the first nights when the wind was not cold enough to cut through you. Wayne sat down and the wood was not warm, but cold did not creep through his jeans. They had the whole night harbour down below them. The sodium vapour lit up the undersides of gulls circling over a Belgian research vessel and a rusted hulk from Russia. If you had binoculars you could look right into the portholes, and even without binoculars Wayne thought how exciting the round, lit-up portholes always looked, no matter how derelict a vessel appeared in daylight.

Steve popped the top off his second beer and said he was sorry, he only had enough money for three. Derek Warford charged him three dollars apiece and there was no way they would even look at him down at the store. Steve kept glancing at Wayne, and finally he said, “How come your face is like that now, puffy?”

If Steve Keating had asked this in an aggressive way, or with a drop of ill humour or insult, Wayne would not have answered him, but Steve had no ill humour in him. He was merely curious, and with a kind of good humour that Wayne liked. He had not met anyone in St. John’s to whom he could tell anything. He could not talk to any of his customers, not even the ones who asked him to fix their stair rails or remove caulking with a chisel so they could open their pantry windows after the winter, and he certainly could not talk to his employer, Frank King.

Spring had tortured coltsfoot out of the ground in vacant lots all over St. John’s. There was a tiny railed landing between Church Hill and Cathedral Street where hyacinth bulbs had newly burst and he had smelled them. He knew all the world was about to open up because of summer, but he had to remain closed. He had to keep secrets and he had to keep his body covered because of what people like Frank King and his customers and Derek Warford’s crowd on the wharf might think. He did not know Steve Keating, and Steve Keating was not his friend, but Wayne felt he wanted to tell him things. It was not just Wayne’s face that looked puffy, as Steve had said. His abdomen was filled with fluid, as it had been at puberty. He wore loose shirts to cover it and kept the button on his jeans undone, but he was starting to feel afraid. He was afraid that what had happened before inside his body might have happened again.

“As a matter of fact,” Wayne said, “I should probably go see a doctor.”

“Are you sick?”

Wayne had a feeling you could present Steve Keating with any problem and he would look at it without moral or social judgement.

“Steve, do you know what a hermaphrodite is?”

“Yeah. Black sea bass are hermaphrodites. Me and my dad catch them every fall. They don’t come this far north any other time. But that’s what black sea bass are. Half male, half female.”

“Did you ever hear of a person being that?”

“No.” Steve took a mouthful of beer and lifted his eyebrows and made great big eyes at the sky as if to say to the clouds, Here’s a good one. But there was no judgement or ridicule in him. He looked at Wayne with real interest, dying to see what he would say next.

“Well, I am. I was born like that. And I didn’t know for a long time because no one told me and they did surgery and I was on a lot of pills. But now I’m off the pills. And the one thing I’m worried about is something you wouldn’t believe.”

“I’d believe it if it was true. I’d have to, wouldn’t I?”

“The one thing I’m worried about is, my body apparently has everything it needs inside itself to make itself pregnant. I bet you never heard a guy say that before.”

Steve looked at him, impressed. There was a sound coming from down on the docks. Night crane workers were lifting containers off a ship that had come down the St. Lawrence from Quebec. There were two cranes. Wayne loved seeing their lattice booms lit against the dark, and he loved how slowly but surely they moved, lowering the containers on their hoist lines. The lattice design was like the bridges he had loved and sketched as a child; there was something about the sight of the cranes that reminded him of the beauty of bridges, and of the slow music Wally Michelin had wanted to sing. Sitting here, now, on the makeshift veranda with Steve Keating, reminded him too of the summer he and Wally had spent on the bridge that he had made with his father. It was intimate, and there were lights strung nearby, and the world was held back a little bit, so it did not encroach on the two people who sat together, set back from ordinary things such as Jack’s Corner Shop and the van and Frank King, and everything to do with loneliness and with selling meat.

“We have a fake baby in human dynamics class,” Steve said. “You want me to see if I can borrow it? It’s supposed to show us how bad it is having to get up at night and look after it. It’s supposed to scare us to death.”

“I’m scared without the fake baby, Steve.”

“Moira Carew was five months pregnant and she didn’t even know. Want me to buy you a pregnancy test? Mr. Caines has them hidden in his shop, down under the pork chops in the back freezer. When Moira had her baby, Miss Tavernor — she’s the human dynamics teacher and the gym teacher too — she made Moira take the fake baby home even though she already had a real baby.”

“That’s cruel.”

“Well, she made her. And Moira killed it. It registers dead if you don’t treat it right. It’s electronic. Would you keep yours?”

“My what?”

“Your baby, if you had one. Would you keep it?”

“Jesus.” Wayne began to regret telling Steve Keating what he had told him. Steve was too young, and once he got excited it seemed as if he could not stop talking.

“Would you give it up for adoption? Do you get periods?”

“I don’t have a place for the blood to run out. I had surgery, which I think I’ve got to get undone. I’m petrified, if you want to know the truth.”

“So she’s all backed up in there.” Steve touched Wayne’s abdomen. It was the first time anyone had touched his body since he had come to St. John’s.

“Yeah.”

“Plus you could be pregnant.”

“I’m hoping that’s not the case. But that is what I’m afraid of.”

“I can take you to the hospital. I take my mother’s car all the time when she’s down the shore at her sister’s. You know what you do? You put chalk marks on the driveway smack up against her back tires. Park her in that same spot when you get back. Right to the molecule.”

“I have my own van, Steve.”

“You do? I’m your man, then. Pass ’em over.”

“What?”

“Your keys.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Come on.”

“I wish you were a bit older.”

“How come?”

“So I could talk to you sensibly.”

“You know what you should do?”