Annabel - Kathleen Winter [131]
“Youth has carried you so far. That’s what I say about all the children passing through my school.”
Wayne remembered how he had not been sure what to think about the eye makeup when the artist had shown it to him in the mirror. He had wondered if it gave him a harrowed look, a kind of false vulnerability that invited people to look at his face in a way different than anyone had looked at it when he presented himself as male. He had these thoughts now as Victoria Huskins questioned him about his mind and his talents, and he did not know what to tell her or what to tell himself. All he knew was that he had to get to a sink and some water and wash the makeup off his face. Why was it called makeup? Did it claim to make up for some deep failing inside a person, and if it did claim to do so, how could the claim be anything other than a façade and a lie? The makeup exaggerated something. Wayne was not sure what it exaggerated. It exaggerated something and diminished something at the same time, and the green shoes had begun to pinch his feet. He felt as if his feet were growing larger with every moment, and his body too, pressed against the seams of the new pants. He knew his body was not really growing, but he knew too that it did not want to be confined in the new outer casing he had found for it at this mall, and it did not want to listen any more to Victoria Huskins, whose voice surrounded him like a third layer of something clammy and alien, on top of the makeup and the clothes. He knew she meant him no harm, and neither had the makeup artist or the salesgirl at Fairweather. But he remembered a cotton shirt and his favourite jeans at home, if you could call it a home, on Forest Road, and he ached to go there and wash the mask off his face and put cotton next to his skin and let it breathe.
“You start out with all the potential,” Victoria Huskins said, “and you’re young. But what happens is, one day you wake up, Wayne, and potential is a thing of the past.”
He did not want to hear this because he already knew it. What was more, he felt that if potential had existed in Victoria Huskins’s other students, it had perhaps not had a chance to exist in himself. Had it? He felt his father had never believed in him. His mother had hoped but had lived under a layer of sorrow throughout his childhood. The only person who knew whether he had ever had potential of any kind, the only one who had ever told him the truth, was Thomasina Baikie. He did not want to sit here talking to Victoria Huskins. He wanted to see Thomasina.
32
Treadway’s Gold
“DAD?”
“Wayne, I’m going to describe to you where I am and I’m hoping you’ll know where that is.”
“Dad?”
“I’m not lost but I’m in a situation where I can’t figure out where to go.”
Wayne heard car horns behind his father. He heard the engine of a truck and he heard a siren and someone shouting, “Gary! Meet me over at the Fountain Spray.”
Treadway Blake had been in the Labrador woods all his life and had not become lost. He could go to a place in the woods that he had never before visited and could travel deep into the new mystery of it, encountering streams that criss-crossed and turned back on themselves. He could turn back on his own path and follow such streams, and it did not matter how many figure eights his path took or how many miles he ventured from territory he had known — he could always find his way home. He had only to look at the tops of the trees to see how they had been shaped by the prevailing wind, or at the direction in which a stream flowed, or the sky above the trees and the sun’s path in it, or the paths of the moon and stars. The wilderness of Labrador was home to him, and he could have explored thousands of miles there and not worried about losing his way. But the seven square miles of downtown St. John’s were a different tale.
He knew the downtown was small because he had seen most of it from the terrace on Military