As luck had it, his father’s car wasn’t there. But Jago’s was, which seemed a godsend. If anyone could act the part of confidant, it was Jago Reeth.
Unfortunately, someone else had the same idea. Cadan walked in to find the two daughters of Ione Soutar in the reception area and the door to the inner workshops closed. Jennie was scrupulously attending to her school prep at the card table that served as his father’s desk while the redoubtable Leigh was pressing one finger to the side of her nostril, a tube of Super Glue on the counter in front of her along with a compact mirror into which she gazed.
“Mum’s inside, Cadan?” Leigh told him with that perpetual, maddening interrogatory inflection of hers, which always suggested she was speaking to a fool. “She’s said it’s personal, so you’re not to go in?”
“I expect she’s talking to Jago ’bout your dad,” Jennie added frankly. She was sucking on her lower lip as she rubbed out pencil marks she’d made on her paper. “She said it’s over, but she keeps crying at night in the bath when she thinks we can’t hear, so I reckon it’s not as over as she wants it to be.”
“She needs to give him the permanent heave-ho?” Leigh said. “I mean, no offense, Cadan, but your father’s a dickhead? Women need to stand up for themselves and they need to stand firm and they especially need to kick arse when they’re not being treated the way they deserve to be treated. I mean, like, what sort of example is she setting for the two of us?”
“What the hell’re you doing to your face?” Cadan asked.
“Mummy wouldn’t let her get her nose pierced, so she’s gluing a stone on,” Jennie informed Cadan in the friendly fashion that was her nature. “C’n you do long division, Cade?”
“God, don’t ask him,” Leigh said to her sister. “He didn’t even pass one GSCE? You know that, Jennie.”
Cadan ignored her. “You want a calculator?” he asked Jennie.
“She’s supposed to show her work?” Leigh told him. She inspected her nose stud and said to the mirror, “I’m not stupid. I’m not going to rubbish up my face. Like I’d ackshully do that?” She rolled her eyes. “What d’you think, Jennie?”
Jennie said without looking, “I think you’re going to have a real row with her now.”
Cadan couldn’t disagree. Leigh looked like someone with a large spot of blood on the side of her nose. She should have chosen a different-coloured stone.
“Mum’s going to make her take it off,” Jennie went on. “It’ll hurt when she does, as well, cos the Super Glue holds it real good. You’ll be sorry, Leigh.”
“Shut up?” Leigh said.
“I only said-”
“Shut up? Put a sock in it? Cram your fist down your throat? Gag yourself with a shovel?”
“You aren’t s’posed to talk to me like-”
The inner door swung open. Ione stood there. She’d been crying. Massively, by the look of her. Damn, but she actually must love his father, Cadan thought.
He wanted to tell her to let his dad go and to get on with her life. Lew Angarrack wasn’t available, and he probably wouldn’t ever be. He’d been dumped by the Bounder-his one, true, eternal childhood love-and he’d not got past it. None of them had. That was their curse.
But how could one explain it to a woman who’d managed to carry on with her life when her marriage had ended? There was no way.
It looked, however, as if Jago had made a heroic effort in that direction. He stood behind Ione with a handkerchief in his hand. He was folding this and returning it to the pocket of his boiler suit.
Leigh took one look at her mother and rolled her eyes. She said, “I suppose this means we won’t be surfing any longer?”
Jennie added loyally, “I didn’t like it anyways,” as she gathered up her schoolbooks.
“Let’s go, girls,” Ione said. She cast a look round the workshop. “Nothing more to be said. Matters are quite finished here.”
Cadan she ignored altogether, as if he were a carrier of the family disease. He stepped out of the way as she herded her offspring out of the shop. She was setting off in the direction of her own shop in the air station as the door swung closed behind her.
“Poor lass,” was Jago’s comment on the matter.
“What’d you tell her?”
Jago went back into the glassing room. “The truth.”
“Which is?”
“No one changes a leopard’s spots.”
“What about the leopard?”
Jago was carefully peeling some blue tape from the rail of a pintail short board. Cadan noticed how bad his shakes were today. “Eh?” Jago said.
“Can’t a leopard change its own spots?”
“I’ll wager you c’n think that one through, Cade.”
“People do change.”
“Nope,” Jago said. “That they don’t.” He applied sandpaper to the resin seam. His glasses slipped down on his nose and he pushed them back into place. “Their reactions, p’rhaps. What they show to the world, if you see what I mean. That part changes if they want it to change. But the inside part? It stays the same. You don’t change who you are. Just how you act.” Jago looked up. A long hunk of his lank grey hair had come loose from his perennial ponytail, and it fell across his cheek. “What’re you doing here, Cade?”
“Me?”
“’Less you’ve changed your name, lad. Aren’t you meant to be at work?”
Cadan preferred not to answer that question directly, so he had a wander round the workshop as Jago continued to sand the rails of the board. He opened the shaping room-scene of his former attempt at employment at LiquidEarth-and he gazed inside.
The problem, he decided, was having been assigned to shaping boards. He had no patience for it. Shaping required a steady hand. It demanded the use of an endless catalogue of tools and templates. It asked one to consider so many variables that keeping them all in mind was an impossibility: the curve of the blank, single versus double concavity, the contours of the rails, the fin positions. Length of board, shape of tail, thickness of rail. One sixteenth of an inch made all the difference and bloody hell, Cadan, can’t you tell those channels are too deep? I can’t have you in here cocking things up.
All right. Fair enough. He was wretched at shaping. And glassing was so boring he wanted to weep. It frayed his nerves: all the delicacy required. The fiberglass unspooling from its roll with just enough excess not to be considered wasteful, the careful application of resin to fix the glass permanently to the polystyrene beneath it in such a way as to prevent air bubbles. The sanding, then the glassing again, then more sanding…
He couldn’t do it. He wasn’t made for it. You had to be born a glasser like Jago and that was that.
He’d wanted to work in the spray room from the first, applying the paint to his own board artwork. But that hadn’t been allowed. His father had told him he had to earn his way into that position by learning the rest of the business first, but when it had come down to it, Lew hadn’t demanded as much from Santo Kerne, had he?