“What I said before.”
Selevan frowned and tried to recall their last conversation which had been a conversation and not merely a request to pass the salt or the mustard or the bottle of brown sauce. He recalled her reaction when he’d waved the letter in her face. He said, “That. Well. Can’t be helped, can it.”
“Can be helped. But it doesn’t matter now. This doesn’t change anything, you know, no matter what you think.”
“What’s that?”
“This. Sending me off. Mum and Dad thought it would change things as well, when they made me leave Africa. But it won’t change a thing.”
“Think that, do you?”
“I know it.”
“I don’t mean the bit about leaving and the things changing in your head. I mean the bit about what I think.”
She looked confused. But then her expression altered in that quicksilver way of hers. Did every adolescent do that? he wondered.
“S’pose,” he said, “your grandie’s more’n he seems to be. Ever reckon that? I wager not. So collect your belongings and make that phone call to your guv. Tell him where you’ll leave the key and let’s shove off.”
Having said that, he left the shop. He watched the traffic coming up the Strand as townsfolk returned from their jobs in the industrial estate at the edge of town and farther away, as far as Okehampton, some of them. In time, Tammy joined him and he set off back towards the wharf with her trailing at a slower pace that he took as she likely meant it: reluctant cooperation with her grandfather’s plans for her.
He said to her, “Got your passport with you, I take it. How long’ve you had it out of its hidey place?”
She said, “A while.”
“What’d you mean to do with it?”
“Didn’t know at first.”
“But you do now, do you?”
“I was saving up.”
“For what?”
“To go to France.”
“France, is it? You heading for gay Paree?”
“Lisieux,” she said.
“Leer-what?”
“Lisieux. That’s where…you know…”
“Oh. A pilgrimage, is it? Or something more.”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t have enough money yet anyway. But if I had it, I’d be gone from here.” She came up to his side then and walked along with him. She said as if finally relenting, “It’s nothing personal, Grandie.”
“Didn’t take it that way. But I’m glad you didn’t do a runner. Would’ve been a rough one to explain to your mum and dad. Off to France, she is, praying at the shrine of some saint that she read about in one of her sainty books that’s she’s not supposed to be reading anyways but I let her read cos I reckoned words’s not going to do much to her head one way or ’nother.”
“That’s not precisely true, you know.”
“Anyways, I’m glad you didn’t scarper cos they’d have my skin for that one, your mum and dad. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, but, Grandie, some things can’t be helped.”
“And this is one of them, is it?”
“That’s how it is.”
“Sure of it, are you? Because that’s what they all say when the cults get hold of them and send them out on the streets to beg money. Which they then take off them, by the way. So they’re trapped like rats on a sinking ship. You know that, don’t you? Some big guru with an eye for girls?just like you?who’re meant to have his babies like a sheik in a tent with two dozen wives. Or one of them, you know, polygammers.”
“Polygamists,” she said. “Oh, you really can’t think this is like that, Grandie. You’re joking about it. Only I don’t think it’s funny, see?”