He let his eyes fall on the photo. It was the first year after they lost the boy. They’d taken the holiday with some other families, as a cushion against themselves. He and Norma and Gordon wouldn’t have to be alone. The Eastaughs and their boy. The town clerk. Their little circle of Bluebird, holding him and Norma tight.

You wouldn’t want to be out at Chester Dam and find yourself alone.

Who had taken the photo? The irony was, it must have been himself, with Tony’s camera. Recording and labelling, their life’s work.

Norma, Tony and his wife, the boys, and the town clerk. The stone wall of Chester Dam resplendent in the background. The ghost boy in their frowning faces.

Ron wouldn’t be seen dead in shorts with an ironed crease.

THE COUNTRY CLUB

The country club

Three weeks later, waiting for her mother-in-law by the rose garden of the Bluebird Country Club, Kelly Chidgey Grimes wondered how she had lived so long without golf. She limbered up with her rescue club, feeling the eyes of a passing herd of gentlemen members. It didn’t matter that most of them predated the Cretaceous. Today was a glorious Ocean City late-year Thursday. Social golf day. On weekends, when the younger predators were on the course, she drew a higher quality of eyeball with her pleated tartan mini and pink sleeveless top. Golf fashion for men was a contradiction in terms, but one of her incredible recent discoveries was that golf clothes could make women look hotter. It didn’t hurt that the standard of competition was not the highest.

Kelly’s competitive urges had been bottled up for too long. She played golf to win, she manipulated her handicap to give herself the best chance of success—she was a serial ‘burglar’ off a twenty-eight mark—and damn it, if women golfers weren’t so boring and would take her hints for a little flutter, she could monetise the thing. Men, who would gamble over each shot let alone each hole, were more fun.

She revelled in the irony of splitting with her husband in mid-life to take up golf. Like any club, Bluebird was full of male members who, having acquitted their obligation to provide for their children, faced the deep existential crisis of western civilisation: my wife or my golf clubs? On the other hand, a wife who left her husband and threw herself into golf: that got their attention. ‘Yoo-hoo!’

A hand waved in the corner of her vision. An involuntary groan escaped her. She looked around to see if any of the members copping an indiscreet eyeful of her tanned calves had heard her. She slipped her rescue into her bag and strode purposefully to the car park, where her soon-to-be ex-husband mooched beside his mother, who was folding herself into a motorised cart.

‘You can’t come any further!’ Kelly hissed. ‘Look at you!’