‘Carn, Kel, where’s ya sense of humour?’ Dog said, tap-tapping another piece, as pleased with himself as when he relocated Kelly’s sweet spot at that party. (Hint: after the champagne, the coke and her incandescent rage at turning fifty, it would have been harder to miss than to find.) She noticed how the others set aside their annoyance with Dog. Life in this little reality refuge had to go on, that was the important thing with those people; nothing changed even when—particularly when—everything had changed. Their collective genius was for transmuting everything into nothing. As far as they were concerned, Dog was getting up their noses because he was the irritating prick they knew, not because he’d rooted Gordon’s missus, who was a curry-munching up-herself filthy rich daddy’s girl, so what did it matter. Indifference, a fair go, being laidback, whatever you wanted to call it, was a collective effort mighty in its tenacity. Even her husband, now hovering over the jigsaw players with that goofy grin. Most of all her husband.

She had to get out of here. But—oh shit, she couldn’t. She lived here. She had to get them out of here. But she was outnumbered. Again.

‘I’ve lost it,’ she replied to Dog’s question. ‘Someone let me know if you find it.’

She slapped the diagonal pine feature wall and stomped downstairs, out of the house for—what, a romantic walk on the beach, hand in hand with herself? And who should she run into but another of them, Gordon’s omigod-daughter on her way up from a board session with her salon de clubbie refusées.

Admitting defeat, Kelly slumped onto the driftwood log that served as a bench on the patch of lawn and watched Lou come up. The girl was built like a wheelie bin, but in her one-piece swimsuit all that wet muscle looked kind of sexy. Kelly remembered Dog saying he liked athletic women. ‘You can really wrestle with them,’ he said with relish. But then Dog liked every kind of woman; you could always do something with them. He wasn’t fussy about looks. It was meant to be one of the lovable things about him.

‘You look like you’re running for your life,’ Lou said. Kelly felt mildly offended—Lou did not know her well enough to say something so insightful—and saw herself getting up and walking away in a huff, only to trip down the wooden stairs and break her freaking neck. All in preference to being so see-through.

‘I’m stuck here,’ Kelly said. ‘What’s your excuse?’

‘What makes you say that?’ Lou said with a frustrating pleasantness. At times, Kelly thought, Lou could be Gordon’s daughter. A goddaughter, for God’s sake: it wasn’t that she disliked Lou, it was more that she didn’t understand the point of her.

‘How was training?’ Kelly asked.