Annabel - Kathleen Winter [125]
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