‘To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,’ Carl said. ‘And if you’re a nail, everyone around you looks like a hammer.’

‘What happened?’

‘Not everyone is a “problem”.’

Ben frowned out the window. Uncle Carl had this habit of not taking him directly home. One day they went to the high rock ledges at Cliff Street, another day up the bush tracks of Capri National Park. Carl liked bushwalks. Another day, they had driven an hour to Fairview Lighthouse, Ocean City’s northern limit. Carl talked in long circular spools, and Ben tended to switch off. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his uncle’s conversation; it was just that he lost the thread of Carl’s thoughts, which scattered into a confetti of poetry, philosophy, religion and personal reminiscence. But Ben enjoyed the excursions, which saved him from sitting in that damp smelly basement to do his homework.

They were stuck in the Capri afternoon traffic.

‘Fuck off!’ Carl said to the cars.

‘Were you a “problem” today?’ Ben asked.

Carl waited until the traffic moved again.

‘I was wondering how I was inside the office of Jude fucking Oxenford. A new low, that’s for sure. She decided not to report it. I think this was breaking the rules.’

‘Report what?’

‘I was involved in an assault on school grounds,’ Carl said.

‘You assaulted Daniel?’

Carl wheeled into the council car park and took a ticket at the boom gate.

‘Where are we going?’ Ben asked.

Rather than answering Ben’s questions, Carl applied his full concentration to fitting his Camry into a space marked out in the 1970s (as Ben had heard his dad complain), which was now shrunken to obsolescence between a Skoda Yeti and an Audi Q6. Carl and Ben had to squeeze themselves out. Ben was gentle with his door so as not to hit the Yeti, but even so he startled a guy inside who was rolling a joint. Ben heard Carl’s door bump the Q6. Carl let out a honk of laughter.

Descending the stairwell, Carl resumed his theme. ‘Jude was scared of me.’

‘Wait, what? You can’t hit Daniel, and you can’t hit the principal.’

‘I haven’t hit her since we were six years old. No, she was scared of me taking action against the school for not providing a safe environment. Isn’t that hilarious?’ Carl said without humour. ‘Took me fifty years, but I’ve finally been expelled! You’ll have to come to the car to meet me.’

‘You shouldn’t be wandering the grounds anyway.’

‘I wasn’t.’