Kelly felt Carl’s suffering as they wove through the crowd to the Beach Cafe. This put her in an even better mood.

She caught sight of Leonie in a yellow shell jacket with red trousers. You could stick her in the sand and order the board riders to stay south. She was twittering to Paolo with eye-hurting brightness. Carl glowered. Her brother didn’t like foreigners; he had invented his own niche of bigotry. He had a liberal, cosmopolitan, artistic, intellectual bent; he deplored racism against First Nations and his fellow People of Colour, he was a bare-knuckled defender of his LGBTQI+ friends, he would chain himself to an old-growth tree rather than see it cut down, and yet the things Kelly had heard him mutter against Brazilians, Jews and Southern Europeans were pure Old Bluebird. Watching the two Italian baristas, Carl’s lips were rippling homicidally, as if he cared so much about his stepmother’s honour it was worth taking a kitchen knife to Paolo’s throat.

Some dickhead at the front of the queue was simpering, ‘I’ve just spent three weeks in Rome and never got an Italian coffee as good as yours.’ Lucio looked unconvinced and Carl shaped to hurl the dickhead into the nearest banksia tree. Kelly informed the dickhead that the coffee here was Australian-grown and brewed to a ‘local recipe’ and the Italian boys were just window dressing, and in any case they were as straight as the day is long, so the dickhead was barking up the wrong tree.

The dickhead was about to bite back, but then Gordon said, ‘And the queue starts over there,’ with such cold-eyed ferocity that the dickhead reconsidered and trudged meekly to the end of the line.

Kelly said, ‘Nobody messes with the politeness police.’

‘Just a right way to do things,’ Gordon said. ‘You think I might get a customer-facing job in crowd control?’

‘Why were you in such a hurry to get out of the house?’

‘Honest?’

Kelly smiled. ‘No time like the present.’

‘I can’t keep up, everything’s falling apart. It’s not just the floor. The steps might collapse under her. The knob on the banister might come off in her hand. She might trip on the Shitfuckerpoobum and break her neck.’

‘You’re worried about accidents?’

‘I’m ashamed. I love that place, and I’m letting it go to rack and ruin. I can’t let her see what I’ve done to it.’

‘It’s not you, Gordon. It’s time. Look at what it’s done to all of us.’

Carl was bumbling past. ‘Gotta get out of here, can’t stand their fucken dago coffee anyway.’ He headed for the aluminium grandstand improvised at the northern side of the surf club, reserved for competitors’ families. Kelly followed him, leaving Gordon to deal with Leonie. As she followed Carl up the steps of the grandstand, Kelly thought she heard someone say, ‘Is he still alive?’