Kathleen Winter - Annabel

To walk home from Shelley’s All-Day Breakfast, Wayne had to pass the Anglican graveyard, where massive beeches had knots the size of faces, and the knots grew malevolent. He knew this was a trick of his mind, but they did; they flew alive, became malicious spirits, and as he walked past them he had to look away, for fear they would snatch his mind. Wayne knew this was a dangerous way to think, and he thought instead about the way Joanne’s wrist had insinuated itself around the swinging door. As he passed the cemetery trees, the tree he found most malevolent faced him: angry sinew with an eye rimmed in gold bark and studded with a pupil of cracked wood. The loneliness doled out to each of us in different quantities, hidden or diluted, was unmasked. It had the power to grab the backs of Wayne’s eyeballs and pluck them inward.

He heard a Metrobus stop on Chalker’s Hill, the shout of a three-year-old boy running over the graves, his mother shouting, “Ashton! Ashton! Get out of that, come over here!” The whirr and scree of starlings. Houses petered out and bald grass banked the lake, studded with Coffee Crisp and Aero wrappers and Pepsi ring tops. There was the parking lot of Wayne’s building, featureless brick with its flat roof and rust stains running from the eavestroughs. There was a letter in his mailbox. His feet clacked on the plastic edges of the stairs. To open his door Wayne had to force it over the carpet. There was a bowl of egg congealing on his little half-table with its Formica top. He had intended to make an omelette. He put the letter on the table. His sheet and pillow lay under the living room window.

Wayne warmed his small glass salt shaker on the stove and lay down with it and pretended it was part of his lover’s body. But who was his lover? He closed his eyes and pushed the warm glass against the deeply hidden vagina that belonged to Annabel. This created an orgasm, deep inside, deeper by far than anything he had experienced with Gracie Watts. He shuddered and cried out for the lover who had done this to him, who had found Annabel’s body inside him, but he was alone. His phone was flashing. It was the previous tenant’s phone and had been flashing since he moved in. He looked out the kitchen window at the vinyl siding of a bungalow next door. The bit of sky over the bungalow roof was a piece of endlessness. Wayne felt he had randomly superimposed himself on a city that could have done equally well for itself with or without him. He lifted the receiver, pressed a couple of buttons, and listened. A man wanted Lucinda to pick up Clorets and reading glasses at Lawtons. The man had sat on his old ones in the car and broken them. Wayne erased the message and remembered the letter.

PEOPLE WILL NOTICE WHEN A neighbour is not herself but for a long time they will not intervene. Time is so sneaky that one minute you are thinking you have not seen such-and-such a person for a few days, perhaps you should phone them, and the next time you think that thought, spring has come. During the winter that Jacinta was alone, Joan Martin and Eliza Goudie had thought about her many times. Eliza clipped an article from January’s Chatelaine that described exactly how a woman could view her middle-aged husband with renewed romantic vigour, and she put it under the brass dolphin on her hall side table to give to Jacinta, but by spring it was still there. Joan phoned Jacinta’s number several times to say they had the old, traditional kind of sweet william in Vesey’s seed catalogue, because Jacinta had told her that was one flower she would take the trouble to send for by mail, but Jacinta had not answered the phone. Joan ordered an extra packet of seeds for Jacinta, but by April they had not arrived.

Treadway Blake did not often write a letter. His address, in ballpoint, was shaky and intimate but his letter was short and to the point. With it inside the envelope were two more letters: one from the department of motor vehicle registration and the other from MCP, which was the provincial medicare plan. The second one had been neatly opened with a knife. That was how Treadway opened letters.

Dear Wayne, Treadway had written. Here is your driver’s licence renewal. You need to get that done. I’ve also had a letter from the government about the insurance for your medication. I’m not sure what to do about it and there are some parts I cannot make head nor tail out of, so I am sending it to you and maybe you can have someone look at it down there. There must be someone at the confederation building who knows what it is all about. Your mother and I are fine, but I came home from the trapline to find her a bit confused. I am going to try to have someone look in on her when I go out again in a week or so. Love, Dad.

Wayne looked at the government letter. It contained forms and columns, and it asked Treadway to fill out the forms and the government would arrive at a decision about the amount Treadway would have to pay for Wayne’s medications between now and the time he turned twenty-one; then there was another form concerning the years beyond that date. They seemed to want to know whether Wayne was going to a university, and there were so many numbered lists he could not figure out the form any better than his father had done. But there was one thing he could discern, and it was that his hormone medication cost a lot more than he had imagined. There was a figure for the MCP contribution over the past year and another one for parental contribution.

The only time to get his father on the phone, Wayne knew, was at five in the morning. That was when Treadway ate breakfast, and it was the only time he could be relied on to be inside the house. Wayne was awake half the night thinking of what he would say to his father.

“Dad?”

Treadway was a man who did not like talking on the phone. The phone was for getting information across that could not be exchanged in any other way. It was the new form of telegrams.

“Did you figure it out, son? Were you able to see exactly what MCP was getting at?”

“I’m calling to say you might as well save yourself some money.”

“What’s that now, Wayne?”

“I’ve been thinking for a while about being on all these drugs, and not liking it.”

Wayne had been watching people. He watched men and women who passed him on their way to get pea soup at Shelley’s at lunchtime or croissants at the new bakery across from the Bank of Montreal. The street smelled of cigarettes, perfume, and coffee, and Wayne saw that the faces, bodies, clothes, and shoes of the men and women who passed him had been divided and thinned. The male or female in them had been both diluted and exaggerated. They were one, extremely so, or they were the other. The women trailed tapered gloves behind them and walked in ludicrous heels, while the men, with their fuzzy sideburns and brown briefcases, looked boring as little beagles out for the same rabbit. You define a tree and you do not see what it is; it becomes its name. It is the same with woman and man. Everywhere Wayne looked there was one or the other, male or female, abandoned by the other. The loneliness of this cracked the street in half. Could the two halves of the street bear to see Wayne walk the fissure and not name him a beast?

His father did not know Thomasina Baikie had told Wayne about the fetus, and Wayne did not want to talk about that now. He did not want to explain himself to his father at all. He did not want to talk about the beast, or the fissure, or anything that he felt. His father had known things and had not told him. His father had kept secrets he had no business keeping, secrets that were not Treadway’s own.

“What are you saying, son?”

“I’m saying I’ve been thinking about letting the drugs go gradually. I was thinking about it anyway, before they sent you the forms.”