She sat behind her brother, who was shivering in the thirty-degree heat under his duffle coat. Leonie, takeaway cup in hand, took up a position at the base of the grandstand and put on a show for the beach sprinters. Did she care who won? Kelly wondered if Leonie could ever have imagined herself, in her fifties, on a strip of sand on the edge of this island continent, cheering nonsensically for children diving into sand to grasp pieces of hosepipe.

‘Why does she want us here?’ she asked Carl, whose shivers spasmed violently.

‘Laying the pelts of slaughtered beasts before the peasants. Here are your princes, at my feet.’

‘You’re such a fucking wanker,’ Kelly said.

Her eye was caught by a smile, apparently for her, from the front row. Jude Oxenford was on her way up, getting away with a sundress in broad white and navy diagonals, grinning from under a pizza-sized straw hat and Jackie Onassis sunglasses.

‘Mind if I sit down? Oh, hello, Carl. Long time no see.’

Carl gurgled something dismissive, or French. Jude, accustomed to surly teenagers, nodded understandingly. Carl walked to the end of the top deck and turned away from the beach, finding something interesting to look at in the parking lot behind the BSLSC.

‘I hear your goddaughter’s been given permission to race her surfboat crew,’ Jude said. ‘That’s exciting!’

‘Wouldn’t have happened in our day,’ Kelly said. ‘And she’s not my goddaughter, she’s Gordon’s.’

‘Can you imagine the old crusties!’ Jude laughed, and put on an old Anzac rumble: ‘No, no, no—not properly registered. Girls! I don’t bloody well think so!’ She grinned at Kelly and said, in her own voice, ‘Do you remember when the law stopped them from banning women from the upstairs bar of the BSLSC, so they re-designated the whole top floor as the men’s changing room? If they couldn’t maintain a rule to keep women out, the threat of old codgers walking around in the nude would do the job for them. There was some kind of genius in it.’

‘They never let progress get in their way.’

‘And we never realised how much we needed the patriarchy,’ Jude said. ‘It was our only defence against the future.’ She nodded towards the empty mansions serried around the headlands.

‘Are you here to keep an eye on your students?’ Kelly said.

‘I’d have no hope of keeping an eye on anyone! It’s chaos, isn’t it? I’d say organised chaos but I’m not entirely sure about organised. Those crusties had something going for them. A clip over the ear to put the kids in line instead of all this namby-pamby no-touching. Talk about herding cats. It’s as bad as school. Is Ben participating?’

‘He’s water boy for Lou’s Lezzos,’ Kelly said.

‘You can’t say that.’

‘I just did. So why are you here?’