Elizabeth George: Careless in Red

Had he been out working with the bicycle instead of using it as a means of transport, Cadan wouldn’t have had the parrot with him. In early days, he’d taken Pooh along, finding a perch for him near the side of the empty swimming pool while he ran through his routines and developed strategies for improving not only his tricks but the area in which he practised them. But some damn teacher from the infants’ school next door to the leisure centre had raised the alarm about Pooh’s vocabulary and what it was doing to the innocent ears of the seven-year-olds whose minds she was trying to mould, and Cadan had been given the word. Leave the bird at home if he couldn’t keep him quiet and if he wanted to use the empty pool. So there had been no choice in the matter. Until today, he’d had to use the pool because so far he’d made not the slightest inroad with the town council about establishing trails for air jumping on Binner Down. Instead, they’d looked at him the way they would have looked at a psycho, and Cadan knew what they were thinking, which was just what his father not only thought but said: Twenty-two years old and you’re playing with a bicycle ? What the hell’s the matter with you?

Nothing, Cadan thought. Not a sodding thing. You think this is easy ? Tabletop? Tailwhip? Try it sometime.

But of course, they never would. Not the town councilors and not his dad. They’d just look at him and their expressions would say, Make something of your life. Get a job, for God’s sake.

And that was what he had to tell his father: Gainful employment was his. Pooh on his shoulder or not, he’d actually managed to acquire another job. Of course, his dad didn’t need to know how he’d acquired it. He didn’t need to know it was really all about Cadan asking if Adventures Unlimited had thought about the use to which its decrepit crazy golf course could be put and ending up with a brokered deal of maintenance work in the old hotel in exchange for utilising the crazy golf course’s hills and dales-minus their windmills, barns, and other assorted structures, naturally-for perfecting air tricks. All Lew Angarrack had to know was that, sacked once again for his myriad failures in the family business-and who the hell wanted to shape surfboards anyway?-Cadan had gone out and replaced Job A with Job B within seventy-two hours. Which was something of a record, Cadan decided. He usually gave his dad an excuse to remain in a state of cheesed-off-at-him for five or six weeks at least.

He was jouncing along the unpaved lane behind Victoria Road and wiping the rain from his face when his father drove past him on the way to the house. Lew Angarrack didn’t look at his son, although his expression of distaste told Cadan his father had clocked the sight he presented, not to mention been given a reminder of why his progeny was on a bicycle in the rain and no longer behind the wheel of his car.

Up ahead of him, Cadan saw his father get out of the RAV4 and open the garage door. He reversed the Toyota into the garage, and by the time Cadan wheeled his bicycle through the gate and into the back garden, Lew had already hosed off his surfboard. He was heaving his wet suit out of the four-by-four to wash it off as well, while the hosepipe burbled freshwater onto the patch of lawn.

Cadan watched him for a moment. He knew that he looked like his father, but their similarities ended with the physical. They had the same stocky bodies, with broad chests and shoulders, so they were built like wedges, and the same surfeit of dark hair, although his father was growing more and more of it over his body, so that he was starting to look like what Cadan’s sister privately called him, which was Gorilla Man. But that was it. As to the rest, they were chalk and cheese. His father’s idea of a good time was making sure everything was permanently in its place with nothing changing one iota till the end of his days, while Cadan’s was…well, decidedly different. His father’s world was Casvelyn start to finish and if he ever made it to the north shore of Oahu-big dream, Dad, and you just keep dreaming-that would be the world’s biggest all-time miracle. Cadan, on the other hand, had miles to go before he slept and the end of those miles was going to be his name in lights, the X Games, gold medals, and his grinning mug on the cover of Ride BMX .

He said to his father, “Onshore wind today. Why’d you head out?”

Lew didn’t reply. He streamed the water over his wetsuit, flipped it, and did the same to the other side. He washed out the boots, the hood, and the gloves before he looked at Cadan and then at the Mexican parrot on his shoulder.

He said, “Best get that bird out of the rain.”

Cadan said, “It won’t hurt him. It rains where he comes from. You didn’t get any waves, did you? Tide’s just now coming in. Where’d you go?”

“Didn’t need waves.” His father scooped the wet suit from the lawn and hung it where he always hung it: over an aluminium lawn chair whose webbed seat caved in with the ghost weight of a thousand bums. “I wanted to think. Don’t need waves for thinking, do I?”

Then why go to the trouble of getting the kit ready and hauling it down to the sea? Cadan wanted to ask. But he didn’t because if he asked the question, he’d get an answer and the answer would be what his father had been thinking of. There were three possibilities, but since one of them was Cadan himself and his list of transgressions, he decided to forego further conversation in this area. Instead, he followed his father into the house, where Lew dried his hair off with a limp towel left hanging for this purpose on the back of the door. Then he went to the kettle and switched it on. He’d have instant coffee, one sugar, no milk. He’d drink it in a mug that said “Newquay Invitational” on it. He’d stand at the window and look at the back garden and when he’d finished the coffee, he’d wash the mug. Mr. Spontaneity himself.

Cadan waited till Lew had the coffee in hand and was at the window as usual. He used the time to establish Pooh in the sitting room at his regular perch. He returned to the kitchen himself to say, “Got a job, then, Dad.”

His father drank. He made no sound. No slurp of hot liquid and no grunt of acknowledgement. When he finally spoke, it was to say, “Where’s your sister, Cade?”

Cadan refused to allow the question to deflate him. He said, “Did you hear what I told you? I’ve got a job. A decent one.”

“And did you hear what I asked you? Where’s Madlyn?”

“As it’s a workday for her, I expect she’s at work.”

“I stopped there. She’s not.”

“Then I don’t know where she is. Moping into her soup somewhere. Crying into her porridge. Whatever she might be doing instead of pulling herself together like anyone else would. You’d think the bloody world has ended.”

“Is she in her room?”

“I told you-”

“Where?” Lew still hadn’t turned from the window, which was maddening to Cadan. It made him want to down six pints of lager right in front of the man, just to get his attention.

“I said I didn’t know where-”

“Where’s the job?” Lew pivoted, not just a turn of his head but of his whole body. He leaned against the windowsill. He watched his son, and Cadan knew he was being read, evaluated, and found wanting. It was an expression on his father’s face he’d been looking at since he was six years old.

“Adventures Unlimited,” he said. “I’m to do maintenance on the hotel till the season starts.”

“What happens then?”

“If things work out, I’ll do instruction.” This last bit was a stretch, but anything was possible, and they were in the process of interviewing instructors for the summer, weren’t they? Abseiling, cliff climbing, sea kayaking, swimming, sailing…He could do all of that, and even if they didn’t want him in those activities, there was always freestyle BMX and his plans for altering the crazy golf course. He didn’t mention this to his father, though. One word about the freestyle bicycle and Lew would read Ulterior Motives as if the words were tattooed on Cadan’s forehead.