“Didn’t see his car outside.”

“What’re you doing here, then?”

Cadan felt that old plummeting of his spirits. He stifled a sigh. “Phone,” he reminded Lew.

Lew took off the latex gloves he wore for work, and he strode to the reception area. Cadan followed for want of anything better to do, although he peeked into the spraying room and considered the lineup of shaped boards to be painted as well as the kaleidoscope of bright colours that had been tested against the walls. In reception he could hear his father saying, “What’s that you say?…No, of course not…Where the hell is he? C’n you put him on the phone?”

Cadan wandered back out. Lew was behind the counter where the phone sat amid the mounds of paperwork on the card table that served as his desk. He glanced at Cadan and then away.

“No,” Lew said to the bloke on the other end of the line. “I didn’t know…I damn well would have appreciated it if he’d told me…I know he’s not well. But all I can tell you is what he told me. Had to step out to speak to a mate in a bit of bother up at the Salthouse…You? Then you know more than I do…”

Cadan clocked that they were talking about Jago, and he did question where the old man was. Jago had been nothing if not a model employee for his dad during the time he’d worked at LiquidEarth. Indeed, Cadan often felt that Jago’s performance as a stellar worker bee was one of the reasons he himself looked so bad. At work on time, never out for illness, not a complaint about anything, nose to the grindstone, perfectionist in what he had to do. For Jago not to be here now brought up the subject of why and made Cadan listen more closely to the conversation his dad was having.

“Redundant? God, no. No reason for that. I’ve a pile of work and the last thing on my mind is making anyone…Well, then, what did he say?…Finished? Finished?” Lew looked round the reception area, particularly at the clipboard on which the orders for boards were attached. There was a thick stack of them, the mark of longtime surfers’ respect for Lew Angarrack’s work. No computer design and computer shaping here, but the real thing, all of it done by hand. So few craftsmen could do what Lew did. They were a dying breed, their work an art form that would pass into surfing lore like the earliest long boards fashioned of wood. In their place would come the hollow-core boards, the computerised designs, everything programmed into a machine that would belch out a product no longer lovingly shaped by a master who rode waves himself and consequently knew what an extra channel or the degree of tilt of a fin would truly do to a board’s performance. It was a pity, really.

“Gone altogether?” Lew was saying. “Damn…No. There’s nothing more I can tell you. You seem to know more than I do anyway…I couldn’t say…I’ve been busy myself. He didn’t seem any different…I can’t say that I did.”

Shortly thereafter, he rang off and he spent a moment staring at the clipboard. “Jago’s gone, then,” he finally said.

“What d’you mean, gone?” Cadan asked. “For the day? Forever? Something happen to him?”

Lew shook his head. “He just left.”

“What? Casvelyn?”

“That’s it.”

“Who was that?” Cadan nodded at the phone although his father hadn’t looked at him to see the nod.

“Bloke Jago lives by in the caravan park. Talked to him as he was packing up but couldn’t get much sense out of him.” Lew took off his headphones and dropped them onto the table. He leaned against the counter with its display of fins, wax, and other paraphernalia, his hands supporting him and his head lowered as if he were studying what was inside the case. “Well, that buggers us,” he said.

A moment passed during which Cadan saw Lew reach up and rub his neck where it was no doubt sore from shaping the surfboard blanks. He said, “Good thing I came by, then.”

“Why’s that?”

“I c’n help you out.”

Lew raised his head. He said, “Cade, I’m far too tired to argue with you just now.”

“No. I don’t mean what you think,” Cadan told him. “I c’n see how you’d reckon I was seizing my moment: Now he’ll have to let me spray the boards. But that’s not what this is.”

“What is it, then?”

“Just…me helping you. I c’n shape if you like. Not as good as you but you can show me. Or I c’n glass. Or spray. Or do the hand sanding. Doesn’t matter to me.”

“And why would you want to do that, Cadan?”

Cadan shrugged. “You’re my dad,” he said. “Blood’s thicker than…well, you know.”

“What about Adventures Unlimited?”

“That didn’t work out.” Cadan saw his father’s expression alter to one of resignation. He hastened to add, “I know what you’re thinking but they didn’t sack me. It’s just that I’d rather work for you. We’ve got something here and we shouldn’t let it…die.”

Die. There was the frightening word. Cadan hadn’t realised just how frightening die actually was until this moment because he’d spent his life so focused on another word entirely and that word was leave. Yet trying to stay one step ahead of loss didn’t prevent loss from happening, did it? The Bounder still bounded and other people still walked away. As Cadan himself had done time and again before it could be done to him, as Cadan’s father had done for much the same reasons.

But some things endured in spite of one’s dread, and one of them was the blessing of blood.

“I want to help you,” Cadan said. “I’ve been playing it stupid. You’re the expert, after all, and I reckon you know how I can learn this business.”

“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.