Jago nodded. “Always. Hope you know that.”
Cadan felt as if someone had kindly withdrawn his thumb from the dyke, offering to take over the rescue of the lowlands in his stead. The story came forth. His father’s disgust, Cadan’s dreams of the X Games, Adventures Unlimited, Kerra Kerne, Ben Kerne, Alan Cheston, and Dellen. Last of all, Dellen. It was all a jumble to which Jago listened patiently. He sanded the surfboard’s rails slowly, nodding as Cadan went from point to point.
At the end he homed in on what they both knew was the salient detail: Cadan Angarrack caught in a delicto that was just about as flagrante as it could have been, short of the two of them?himself and Dellen Kerne?having been caught writhing and moaning on the kitchen floor. Jago said, “Sounds like mother, like son to me. Didn’t think of that when she played with you, Cade?”
“I didn’t expect…I didn’t know her, see. I thought something was a bit off with her when she came upon me yesterday, but I didn’t think…She’s like…Jago, she could be my mum.”
“Not bloody likely. For her faults, your mum stuck to her own kind, yes?”
“What d’ you mean?”
“Way Madlyn tells it?and, mind, she doesn’t think much of your mum?Wenna Angarrack with her list of surnames always sticks to her own age group. From what you say, this one”?and Cadan took from Jago’s tone of aversion that he was referring to Dellen Kerne?“doesn’t appear to mind what age she’s doing it with. ’Spect you had signs when you met her.”
“She asked me about it,” Cadan admitted.
“It?”
“Sex. She asked me what I did for sex.”
“And you didn’t think that was a bit off, Cade? Woman her age making enquiries like that? She was readying you.”
“I didn’t really…” Cadan shifted his uneasy gaze off Jago’s shrewd one. Above the radio hung a poster, a Hawaiian girl inexplicably wearing nothing but a lei round her neck and a wreath of palm leaves on her head as she surfed a good-size wave with casual skill. It came to Cadan as he looked upon her that some people were born with amazing confidence, and he was not one of those people.
“You knew what was going on,” Jago said. “S’pose you thought you got yourself a three-way girl with no asking, eh? Or, worst case, a bit of how’s yer father. Either way, you’re happy.” He shook his head. “Blokes your age never can think outside of the envelope, and we both know what that envelope is.”
“She offered me lunch,” Cadan said in his own defence.
Jago laughed. “Bet she did. And she was planning to be your pudding.” He set down his sandpaper and leaned against the board. “Girl like that’s trouble, Cade. You got to know how to read her from the start. She gets a boy by the short ones by giving him a taste, eh? A little bit now, and a little bit then till he’s got the whole. Then it’s on again, off again till he don’t know which part of her’s the part to believe in so he believes in it all. She makes him feel ways he’s never felt, and he thinks no one can make him feel the same. That’s how it works. Best learn from this and let it go.”
“But my job,” he said. “I need the job, Jago.”
Jago pointed at him with his trembling hand. “What you don’t need is that family,” he said. “Look what hooking into the Kernes did to Madlyn. She better off for spreading her legs for that boy of theirs?”
“But you let them use your?”
“’Course I did. When I saw I couldn’t talk her out of letting Santo in her knickers, least I could do was my best to make certain they were safe about it, so I said for them to go to Sea Dreams. But did that help matters? Made them worse. Santo used her up and spat her out. Only good was that at least the girl had someone to talk to who didn’t shout the I-told-you-so’s at her.”
“Reckon you wanted to, though.”