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By Root 712 0

happy. He had not wanted to start explaining his feelings to his father but he had begun to do so anyway, and now wished he had not. When he got off the telephone, he went to the bathroom cabinet and took the remainder of his green pills and flushed them down the toilet. He did this because they were the biggest. He was supposed to take one of the green pills each day, and if he did not cut them in half they got stuck in his throat. He hated the green pills. The other pills, the yellow ones and the white capsules, were smaller. The yellow ones were tiny. He would take one a day of each of these instead of two, until they ran out. He had enough left that he could do this over a month or six weeks, and if that was not gradual enough he would just have to live with whatever happened.

26

The Battery

THE 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