He said, “What’s this, then?” and he pulled it out. Not a necklace, he realised. Because if it was, it was the oddest necklace he’d ever looked at.
It had two ends, each of which was identical. They had small squares of cloth attached to them. These were embroidered with an ornamental M above which was embroidered a small gold crown. Selevan examined the cloth squares suspiciously. He said to Tammy, “What’s this, then, girl?”
“Scapular,” she told him.
“Scapper-what?”
“Scapular.”
“And the M means?”
“Mary.”
“Mary who?” he demanded.
She sighed. “Oh, Grandie,” was her reply.
This response didn’t exactly fill him with relief. He pocketed the scapular and told her to get her arse out to the car. When he joined her, he knew it was time, so he spoke.
“Is it the fear?” he asked her.
“What fear?”
“You know what fear. Men,” he said. “Has your mum…You know. You bloody well know what I’m talking about, girl.”
“I don’t, actually.”
“Has your mum told you…?”
His wife’s mum hadn’t. Poor Dot knew nothing. She’d come to him not only a virgin but as ignorant as a newborn lamb. He’d made a mess of things because of his inexperience and his nerves, which had evidenced as impatience and had reduced her to frightened tears. But modern girls weren’t like that, were they? They knew it all before they were ten.
On the other hand, ignorance and fear explained a lot about Tammy. For they could be what lay at the root of how she was living at present, all huddled into herself.
He said, “Has your mum told you ’bout it, girl?”
“About what?”
“Birds and bees. Cats and kittens. Has your mum told you?”
“Oh, Grandie,” she said.
“Stop the oh grandie and put me in the bloody picture. Because if she hasn’t…” Poor Dot, he thought. Poor ignorant Dot. The oldest girl in a family of girls, never having seen a grown naked man except in museums and hadn’t the poor fool woman actually believed that the male genitalia were shaped like fig leaves…God, what a horror the wedding night had been and what he’d learned from it all was the idjit he’d been to have been respectful and waited for marriage because if they’d done it beforehand at least she would have known whether she wanted to marry at all…Only she would have insisted upon marriage at that point, so any way you looked at, he’d have been caught. As he was always caught: by love, by duty, and now by Tammy.
“So what’s oh grandie meant to mean?” he asked her. “You know? You’re embarrassed? You’re what?”
She lowered her head. He thought she might be about to cry, and he didn’t want that, so he started the car. They rumbled up the slope and out of the caravan park. He saw that she was not going to speak. She intended to make this difficult for him. Damn and blast her, she was a stubborn little thing. He couldn’t reckon where she got that from, but it was no wonder her parents had reached the point of despair with her.