“I wouldn’t blame you,” Steve said, “if you hated me now.”
“I don’t hate you, Steve.”
“You can if you want.”
“Once I like someone, no matter what they do, I keep liking them.”
“That’s what Miss Cramm used to say. She was my teacher before she went away. She let me make top hats for the school play and I didn’t have to be in the play, and that was a good thing because I can’t remember any lines. But now I have Miss Fiander and she doesn’t like me one little bit. Are you working today?”
Wayne had been devising a way to go in and load up his truck without Frank King seeing the cut on his face. He knew Frank took the same lunch break every day and ate at Wendy’s. He wanted to make his deliveries after dusk, but it was nearly June, and every evening the light lasted longer.
“I’m having a problem,” he told Steve, “with the thing I told you about. How I want to go after dark to deliver the meat. Last night it was still light at almost nine o’clock, and no one wants a delivery man coming later than that.”
“I can do it!” Steve looked overjoyed to be able to make it up to Wayne. “My mom has my supper ready at five thirty, after I come home from Caines, and at six o’clock I can come here and we can go in the van and I can go up all the driveways and you can stay in the van. Anyway, you don’t look that bad, if you went and bought yourself some clothes that weren’t so baggy on you.”
Wayne let Steve make the deliveries. He let him go up the driveways with the meat and come back down to the van with the money. And he went to Frank King’s warehouse to load up between 12:40 and 1:30 every day, when he knew Frank was down Thorburn Road eating a double cheeseburger and a baked potato with grated cheese and cheese sauce at Wendy’s, so that Frank would not see him.
But one day Frank came back early because Wendy’s had run out of cheese sauce, and he spied Wayne.
“You definitely need,” he said, “to become more image conscious.” Frank looked at Wayne’s jeans, his shirt and
boots. “Clean, clean, clean.” Frank circled around Wayne,
and Wayne knew it was his body, not his clothes, that unnerved Frank.
“There’s something about your image,” Frank said, “that doesn’t quite… I can’t put my finger on it. Go to Tony the Tailor and get him to fit that shirt for you. He only charges seven dollars. Customers want a cleaner look than what you’ve got here. They’re going to take one look at you and they’re going to shut their doors.”
At night, after his deliveries, Wayne dropped Steve off and drove down to the waterfront and watched the cranes. Sometimes he watched them from his van, but police were always on the lookout for people loitering on the docks, and he did not want to have to answer as to what he was doing down there at midnight. So he went, in the June nights, to sit on the ground under the Southside bridge, and he watched the cranes from there, the lattice booms lit yellow and orange, and the sounds of seawater smacking the dock, and up above, on Water Street, the howls of drunk people on George Street, and honking taxis, and the hum of cars driving between the hotels and steak restaurants and late night bars.
He sat there and he saw men drinking across the road behind the Murray Premises, and he saw other things too, things that reminded him of what his father had said on the phone about what happened to people who did not plan their actions carefully, who lived in the city and had no training, who had not thought of economics and had not looked ahead, and had gained entry to the criminal side of life that was waiting for them. He looked up at the bridge above him, the Southside bridge, and he thought of all the bridges he had once sketched and studied, and he thought how this bridge was not like any of those. It was utilitarian and did not have the beauty of an Italian bridge, and it did not even have the ugliness of London Bridge. It had its own ugliness that came from the fact that nobody cared how it was designed as long as it got cars from the east end of Water Street onto Southside Road. There were beer bottles under it, and condoms and Coke cans, and the bridge itself had a galvanized guardrail with rusty bolts, and it was without spans or any design whatsoever.
The world, evidently, Wayne thought now, was a place that did not care about much in the way of beauty. Derek Warford and his gang had treated him like a piece of garbage they wanted to use and discard. They had cut his face with a broken bottle. They had talked of killing him and tossing his body over the cliff at the top of Signal Hill. But he had escaped. Now the only beauty he knew was in the symmetry of these cranes, their lattice booms and their slow movement, and the way their hoist lines and heavy hook blocks lowered the containers in a slow, straight line the same as a plumb line. There was both engineering and beauty in this, and he spent hours watching it, and in the afternoons before he made his deliveries he did a lot of walking, noticing as he walked that he enjoyed hidden and slanted streets, like Nunnery Hill, and streets with names that were paradoxes, like Long Street, which was the shortest street in St. John’s, or Road de Luxe, which had nothing deluxe about it at all.
Road de Luxe was a funny, steep little road that took you from Waterford Bridge Road to the Village Mall on Topsail Road. It was just a poky little hill with a name that raised your expectations. What it had on it was a shop called Valu Best Convenience, which looked as if it could have been there from a time before the street had acquired its name. Envelopes sat next to matches and emergency candles and ladies’ dress gloves. He noticed a box of loose combs and thought about the length of his hair. He had not had it cut lately because he did not want to go into a barber shop and have the barber look at him closely and ask what kind of back and sides he preferred. With his body’s new softness, the breasts and the new shape of Annabel, a man’s haircut would have looked stranger than hair that had some freedom in it. He had never needed to shave as his father shaved, faithfully every morning, and he had never possessed stubble or what people called five-o’clock shadow. His face had always been smooth, though had he not shaved there would have been some downy facial hair, gold and soft. He bought a razor and a comb. But if he was going to grow into the softness of Annabel, he did not want to have a man’s barbered head or face. He did not know what he wanted, but he knew he did not want to continue to pretend to be a man. At the top of Road de Luxe he decided to cross Topsail Road to the mall. He took his new comb and razor into the men’s washroom near the food court and shaved the almost invisible down from beneath his ears: no more than exists on the faces of many girls. The soap from the dispenser had a chemical scent. His hair, as he used the new comb, reminded him of the soft ferns that would, at this time of year, be sending up feathery heads along the creek behind his parents’ house. Had his face ever been a man’s face?
He checked his Adam’s apple by swallowing. Was it as big as a man’s? He could imagine the answer being either yes or no. Wayne wished he could tell, but his own face was too familiar. A man came in to use the urinals and looked at him suspiciously. The man carried his wallet in his back pocket and there was a faded square of denim around it. The man zippered his fly and shot Wayne a look that had disgust and fear in it. Maybe Frank King had not been far off the mark.
The mall always felt to Wayne as if it were trying to convince him of an illusion that he was not quite getting. That the world was a place with glittering lights. That you could show you loved someone by giving her a new mug with a little white bear inside it. He had once come in to find socks and realized that, in all the mall’s 116 stores, there was not one pair of socks his father would have worn. He looked now in the windows of those stores and tried to catch sight of himself as if he were looking at a stranger. He tried to see, in the transparent reflections of himself walking against racks of blazers and halter tops and Italian-style dinnerware, what other people saw when they looked at him. Were his shoulders hunched? He tried to straighten them, but this thrust his chest out in a way that disquieted him. In the window of Fairweather hung a sweater that looked as if it was the colour it had been when it lived on the sheep. It was a woman’s sweater, but what made it a woman’s? He went into the store to touch it. He pulled the neck to see the size. It was size eight. A salesgirl asked him if she could help. He felt embarrassed. He wanted to know what the sweater would look like on him.