Well, there was nothing for it but to hammer away if she wasn’t going to answer him. So out of the caravan park and up the lane on the way into Casvelyn, Selevan got out his tools. “It’s the natural order of things,” he told her. “Men and women together. Anything else is unnatural and I mean anything else, if you receive my meaning, girl. Nothing to be worried over because we got separate parts, don’t we, and our separate parts’re meant to be joined. You got man on top and woman on bottom. They put their things together because that’s how it goes. He slides in and they rustle about and when it’s all said and done, they go to sleep. Sometimes they get a baby out of it. Sometimes they don’t. But it’s all the way it’s supposed to be and if a man’s got any wits about him, it’s a jolly nice thing that they both enjoy.”
There. He’d said it. But he wanted to repeat one part, to make certain she understood. “Anything else,” he said with a tap on the steering wheel, “isn’t in the natural order of things, and we’re meant to be natural. Natural. Like nature. And in nature, what you don’t see and don’t ever see is?”
“I’ve been talking to God,” Tammy said.
Now that was a real conversation stopper, Selevan thought. Straight out of the blue, like he hadn’t been trying to make a point with the girl. He said, “Have you, now? And what’s God been saying back? Nice that he’s got time for you, by the by, ’cause the bugger’s never had time for me.”
“I’ve tried to listen.” Tammy spoke like a girl with things on her mind. “I’ve tried to listen for his voice,” she said.
“His voice? God’s voice? From where? You expecting it out of the gorse or something?”
“God’s voice comes from within,” Tammy said, and she brought a lightly clenched fist to her skinny chest. “I’ve tried to listen to the voice from inside myself. It’s a quiet voice. It’s the voice of what’s right. You know when you hear it, Grandie.”
“Hear it a lot, do you?”
“When I get quiet I do. But now I can’t.”
“I’ve seen you quiet day and night.”
“But not inside.”
“How’s that?” He looked over at her. She was concentrating on the rain-streaked day, hedgerows dripping as the car skimmed past them, a magpie taking to the sky.
“My head’s full of chatter,” she said. “If my head won’t be silent, I can’t hear God.”
Chatter? he thought. What was the maddening girl on about? One moment he thought he had her sorted, the next he was flummoxed again. “What d’you got up there, then?” he asked, and he poked her head. “Goblins and ghoulies?”
“Don’t make fun,” she told him. “I’m trying to tell you…But there’s nothing and there’s no one that I can ask, you see. So I’m asking you, as it’s the only thing left that I can think to do. I s’pose I’m asking for help, Grandie.”
Now, he thought, they were down to it. This was the moment the girl’s parents had hoped for, time with her granddad paying off. He waited for more. He made a hmph noise to indicate his willingness to listen. The moments ticked by as they approached Casvelyn. She said nothing more till they were in town.
Then it was brief. He’d pulled to the kerb in front of Clean Barrel Surf Shop before she finally spoke. “If I know something,” she said to him, her eyes fixed on the shop’s front door, “and if what I know might cause someone trouble…What should I do, Grandie? That’s what I’ve been asking God, but he hasn’t answered. What should I do? I could keep asking because when something bad happens to someone you care about, it seems like?”
“The Kerne boy,” he interrupted. “D’you know something about the Kerne boy, Tammy? Look at me square, girl, not out of the window.”
She did. He could see she was troubled beyond what he had thought. So there was only one answer, and despite the irritations it might cause in his own life, he owed it to her to give it. “You know something, you tell the police,” he said. “Nothing else to it. You do it today.”
Chapter Twelve