“Now you listen to me,” he’d begun.
“I won’t,” she said quietly. “Not till you start listening to me as well.”
That had been that until she’d opened the car door in Casvelyn. She’d made her final statements and trudged to the shop. At another time he would have followed her. No child of his had ever spoken to him in such a way without feeling the strap, the belt, the paddle, or the palm. Problem was, Tammy was not his child. An injured generation stood between them, and both of them knew who’d caused the wounds.
So he’d let her go, and he’d driven back to Sea Dreams with a very heavy heart. He did some cleaning and he cooked himself a second breakfast of beans on toast, hoping that putting something more in his stomach would cure its roiling. He took this to the table and he ate it, but the food didn’t stop him from feeling ill.
A car door slamming outside diverted Selevan from his misery. He glanced out of the window and saw Jago Reeth opening the door of his caravan as Madlyn Angarrack approached him. Jago came down the steps and held out his arms. Madlyn walked into them and Jago patted first her back and then her head. They went inside the caravan together, with Madlyn wiping her eyes on the sleeve of Jago’s flannel shirt.
The sight pierced Selevan. He couldn’t work out how Jago Reeth managed what was so bloody impossible for himself: being a man to whom young people actually wished to talk. Obviously, there was something to the way Jago listened and responded to youngsters that Selevan had failed to learn.
Except it was so easy when they weren’t your relations, wasn’t it? And wasn’t that something that Jago himself had already said?
It didn’t matter. All Selevan knew was that Jago Reeth might possess the key to a grandfather’s having one single reasonable conversation with his own granddaughter. He needed to find out what that key was before Tammy’s mother pulled the plug and sent the girl elsewhere to take the mental cure.
He waited till Madlyn Angarrack had left, exactly forty-three minutes after she’d arrived. Then he crossed over to Jago’s caravan and rapped upon the door. When Jago opened it, Selevan saw that his friend was about to head off somewhere, as he’d put on his jacket, the half-broken specs which he wore only at LiquidEarth, and a headband to keep his long hair away from his face. Selevan was about to offer an apology for the disruption to Jago’s plans, but the other man stopped him and told him to come inside.
“You got something eating at you,” he said. “I c’n see that without you telling me, mate. Just let me…” Jago went to a phone and punched in a few numbers. He reached an answer machine, it seemed, because he said, “Lew, me. Going to be late. Got a bit of ’mergency here at home. Madlyn stopped in, by the way. Bit upset again, but I think she’s sorted. There’s a board needs checking in the hot cupboard, eh?” He rang off, replacing the receiver.
Selevan watched his movements. The Parkinson’s looked bad this morning. Either that, or Jago’s medication hadn’t kicked in. Old age was a bugger, no doubt of that. But old age and disease together were the devil.
As a means of introducing the subject for discussion, he took from his pocket the necklace he’d removed from Tammy on the previous day. He laid it on the table and when Jago joined him at the banquette that served as a seat, he gestured to it.
“Found this on the girl,” Selevan told him. “She was wearing it round her neck. Said the M means Mary. Do you credit that? Came right out and said it, didn’t she, bland as could be, like it was the most natural thing in the world.”
Jago picked the necklace up and examined it. “Scapular,” he said.