“And that’s what you want to do? Learn this business?”
“Right,” Cadan said.
“What about the bike? The X Games or whatever they are?”
“At the moment, this is more important. I’ll do what I can to keep it important.” Cadan peered at his father closely then. “That good enough for you, Dad?”
“I don’t understand. Why would you want to do it, Cade?”
“Because of what I just called you, you nutter.”
“What was that?”
“Dad,” Cadan said.
SELEVAN HAD WATCHED JAGO drive off, and he wondered about all the time he’d spent with the bloke. He could come up with no answers to the questions that were filling his head. No matter how he looked at things, he couldn’t suss out what the other man had meant and something told him that the entire subject didn’t bear too much consideration anyway. He’d phoned LiquidEarth nonetheless in the hope that Jago’s employer might shed some light on the situation. But what he’d learned told him that whatever Jago had meant by finished, it wasn’t connected to surfboards. Beyond that, he realised he didn’t want to know. Perhaps he was being an out-and-out coward, but some things, he decided, were none of his business.
Tammy wasn’t one of them. He got into the car with all her possessions packed, and he drove to Clean Barrel Surf Shop. He didn’t go in at once to fetch her as there was time to dispense with before she closed the shop for the day. So he parked down on the wharf and he walked from there to Jill’s Juices where he purchased a takeaway coffee?extra strong.
Then he returned to the wharf where he walked the length of it on its north side, edging along the canal. Several fishing boats nudged the dock here, barely bobbing in the water. Mallards floated placidly near them?an entire family of them with mum and dad and, unbelievably, a dozen babies?and a kayaker paddled silently in the direction of Launceston, taking exercise in the late afternoon.
Selevan realised that it felt like spring. It had been spring for more than six weeks now, of course, but that had been a spring of the calendar until this point. This was a spring of weather. True, there was brisk wind off the sea, but it felt different, as the wind does when the weather shifts. On it the scent of newly turned earth came to him from someone’s garden, and he saw that in the window boxes of the town’s library, winter pansies had been replaced with petunias.
He walked to the end of the wharf, where the old canal lock was closed, holding back the water till someone wanted to go out to sea in one of the fishing boats. From this vantage point, he could see the town rising above him to the north, with the old Promontory King George Hotel?a place for adventurous tourists now?acting as doorman to a different world.