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By Root 649 0

Road below the basilica. It dropped down like a pop-up card full of steeples and coloured houses leading down to the ships’ masts and the harbour. But the fact that it was small did not help Treadway find his way around in what felt like a maze. The only part of it that did not fill Treadway with a sense of claustrophobia was the hourglass exit to the harbour, whose little piece of horizon he gazed at to get his bearings, and when he gazed at it he felt he could breathe again. There were shorebirds out there, some related to shorebirds he knew at home. There was also a hawk: he had seen it from Military Road, circling the top of Signal Hill. Was it a red-tailed or a rough-legged hawk? He had watched its flight pattern but from that distance he had been unable to discern. Then he had looked back at the street, and his own path on it, which he had hoped would lead to the Forest Road address where he knew his son rented an apartment.

Treadway Blake had received two visits: one from Wayne’s old principal Victoria Huskins, the other from Thomasina. He did not know what to make of the first visit. He could not imagine his son looking the way Victoria Huskins had said he looked, and he did not know whether Victoria Huskins’s view of anything was a view he could trust. Thomasina Baikie was a different story. She came to him after a phone call from Wayne.

Wayne had asked her to come down to see him; he had a job and he offered to pay her fare down. There was a place in the cliffs, he said, called Ladies’ Lookout. On it was a giant slab of stone in a patch of grass, surrounded by rock that opened onto the sea. He told Thomasina he watched the cranes on the harbourfront every night after work, then he walked to Ladies’ Lookout and sat there alone. He told her what had happened on Signal Hill with Derek Warford in the van, and he said that sometimes he wondered what would happen if, instead of sitting on the stone at Ladies’ Lookout and watching the ocean, he stood and relaxed into the darkness and let his body drop over the edge. He did not think anything worse could happen than what had already happened.

Thomasina asked him specific questions about what Derek Warford had done and he answered them directly. He was telling her all this, he said, not because he wanted to upset her but because she had asked, and because she was the only person he could think of who might know what to do. He was sorry for telling her about it, and he apologized.

“And I’m sorry for telling you,” Thomasina told Treadway. “But I didn’t know what else to do.”

She had not wanted to go into every detail, but Treadway had not permitted her to leave out anything. He was silent then, and she did not know what he could be thinking.

“I could go,” she said. “I told him I could be down there in three days. But I went for a walk in the bush and thought about it and I realized you should know about it. And maybe you want to go down instead of me. I didn’t want it to be like the other time.”

She meant the time that had led, when Wayne was in junior high, to her taking him to hospital. She did not know if she had interfered too much then, and she did not want to risk doing so again. She would go if Treadway would not. But if Treadway wanted to go and help his son, then she felt it was his place to do so and not hers.

In bed Treadway could not sleep. He could not tell Jacinta what had happened; he was alone with the images in his mind. The images came into his mind again and again and he could not make them go away, or change, or turn into other, less harrowing images. He kept seeing that van door opening and six young men invading the van and holding broken glass over his son’s face and humiliating him. In his mind, over and over again, Treadway saw the shadowy figure of one of them tearing the buttons of Wayne’s shirt and undoing his pants and seeing Wayne’s body underneath, the body of Treadway’s own daughter, or son, it did not matter. What mattered was that no one had been there to help Wayne. Treadway had not been there, and he was not there now.

He closed