Annabel - Kathleen Winter [116]
The intern said this, and Annabel, inside Wayne, had been waiting for it. She heard it from her hiding place.
“You can use her name,” the intern said. “Haven’t you got a friend you can tell it to?”
“I did.” Wayne longed for Wally Michelin. “But I lost her.” The incision Haldor Carr had made began to hurt. It hurt a lot, and now all Wayne wanted to do was sleep.
“You have no one?”
Steve Keating had begged to drive Wayne to the hospital. He had badgered him about it until the last minute. Steve had been very interested in the whole story of the part of Wayne that was really a girl.
“I guess I do have one friend,” Wayne said.
But the name, Annabel, was a spell that altered Steve Keating.
Steve had kept the scientific information about Wayne in confidence — there was enough fascination in it for him that he had not needed anyone else to know. But when Wayne came back from hospital and told Steve Keating the new name, Steve could not assimilate it as he could the other facts. It was not as if Wayne had asked Steve to call him the new name. Wayne simply told it to him, and the sound, Annabel, floated like a water lily in Steve’s mind. It bobbed, surprising him in the night as he walked towards Derek Warford and his friends on the wharf.
“Keating,” Derek Warford said. “Where’s your friend tonight? Your new buddy. You and him pretty close or what?”
“Get lost.”
“What’s his name, anyway?”
Steve paid for a bottle out of Warford’s six-pack. He bought a couple more. When he had drunk them, he said, “His name’s Wayne Blake. And guess what.”
“What the fuck, Keating.”
“He just had a sex-change operation.” Steve did not know what else to call it.
“Fuck off.”
“He changed his name to Annabel.”
“Get lost.”
“Look at him up close next time you get the chance.”
“You’re full of it, Keating. You need your balls kicked in. That’d be a perfect sex-change operation for you, wouldn’t it, boys?”
Jack’s Corner Shop had a shelf of Hunt’s tomatoes and Chef Boyardee ravioli and Carnation evaporated milk. A shelf of paper towels and toilet paper and maxi-pads and tampons and garbage bags. A rack of chips and Cheezies, and a shelf of batteries and iron-on patches and WD-40, and a shelf of paper plates and plastic knives, forks, and spoons and birthday candles in the shapes of numbers. Beside the hot dog machine stood beef jerky and apple flips from Janes’s Bakery and one jar of pickled eggs and another of pickled weiners, and lotto tickets, and behind the counter there was a meat slicer on which Jack’s wife, Josephine, and his daughter Margaret Skaines sliced three hundred dollars a week’s worth of turkey roll and bologna. The boys of the Battery went there for smokes and slices of Maple Leaf bologna, and this was what Derek Warford was doing the night he saw Wayne, who had spent a half-hour after work up in the place Steve had shown him — Katie Twomey’s verandah — watching the lights on the water. Wayne had parked his van across from Jack’s Corner Shop and walked up the hill. For the past couple of nights he had not seen Steve. But he did not mind quietly watching the lights alone. Steve had been inclined to talk on and on.
Derek leaned against the counter as Margaret Skaines wrapped his slices in waxed paper, and he took a good look at Wayne.
“How’s it going?”
“Not bad.”
“That’s nice to hear.”
Margaret Skaines gave Derek his meat and he paid a dollar forty-nine for it, and he bought himself a couple of Sweet Marie bars that Jack’s had on sale for sixty-nine cents. He unwrapped his first bologna slice, peeled off the plastic rind with its red and blue letters, threw it on the floor, and bit into the pink, then moved closer. Wayne saw his teethmarks in the bologna and the brown ridges in the skin over his Adam’s apple, and he felt a finger of fear. Derek Warford sized up Wayne’s chest, noticing it in a new light.
“Sorry for your troubles there, Wayne.”
“Pardon?”
“I heard you had to go in for an operation. Hope it wasn’t too serious. Hope it wasn’t prostate cancer or nothing.”
Wayne saw that Steve had told Derek