With the bar stools taken, Gordon sat at one end of the communal trestle table and watched Paolo and his business partner, Lucio, playing to national stereotype by flirting with the bored local women lining up for their fix. Chatty Paolo and gruff Lucio were faithful to the twenty-two-year-old Milanese models they lived with, so it was all a bit of fun, middle-aged lycra queuing up each morning to pay to be mocked by lingering brown eyes and accented sweet talk. At least the relationship between the Italians and the local men was garlanded by a merkin of honesty. Amid the tidal pheromone backwash, the male natives had no time for Paolo or Lucio, and the feeling was mutual. Some of the less happily married locals thought these boys were an actual rather than a theatrical threat to the morals of the Bluebird community, and Paolo and Lucio were too macho to deny it. This mutual misunderstanding had the Beach Cafe doing a thriving trade while teetering on the brink of a punch-up.

‘I didn’t think you could afford a coffee out.’

Too late, Gordon realised that one of the local women being moistened by Italian hospitality was his soon-to-be ex-wife. Kelly landed beside him with a weary sigh. She hitched a maroon singlet strap over her shoulder from where it had slipped down her arm. He’d last seen that singlet bunched in her hand. Where had she changed, he thought. In the alley beside David Archer’s house?

‘Don’t mind me,’ he said.

‘Let me guess.’ One of Kelly’s gifts was to ride over the top of Gordon’s occasional pettishness. ‘Dog gave you cash for something, and the only way you can deal with it is by getting rid of it as fast as you can.’

Gordon had long given up trying to tell her she was right.

‘So you come down here and put it into Leonie’s pocket. My stepmother wins again.’ Kelly allowed herself a smile, which, when Lucio came over with her cappuccino, she transferred effortlessly to the taciturn Italian, who growled Signorina as if he would devour her if only he could be bothered.

‘Signora,’ Gordon corrected Lucio’s departing back.