Then something had turned up: Kelly left him. And then something else turned up: he followed her.

‘Leonie only wants to bring our family together,’ Gordon had said to Kelly when he arrived at The Lodge with his bags.

‘She’ll bring something together,’ Kelly replied, but let him in.

Gordon, unlike Kelly, loved The Lodge with all his heart. He had always loved it, and now that he found himself living in it, he didn’t ever want to leave. He was its custodian. His personal attachment to The Lodge was a true marriage. As a boy, he had helped paint the basement for old man Chidgey, and he had stashed his surfboards and taken his showers and learnt to drink beer and lost his virginity in this living museum to the milestones of his adolescence. Old Bluebirders generally looked at each other with a fundamental aesthetic forgiveness; having known each other all their lives, they still saw the youthful beauty, the prime of life, buried under the wrinkles and sun damage and double chins. (That Dog and Kelly could still see each other as hot young spunks, memory enhanced by cocaine goggles, was a big contributor to Gordon’s problems.) The Lodge embalmed Gordon at the zenith of his promise, and he still saw The Lodge’s best face beneath the decay and mould and water damage and structural unsoundness. He saw the architectural intent behind the ‘feature wall’ of diagonal pine veneer placed randomly beneath the breakfast bar. He saw the craftiness in the brown macramé curtain over the kitchen window, enabling him to spy on incoming visitors without being seen. He relived the 1970s in the design of naked women in the black-and-white downstairs shower curtain. Where most houses tended to be refurbished in one fell swoop, dated like layers of geological catastrophe in sedimentary rock, The Lodge was a permanent work in process, bits improved at whim, and with its haphazard ageing Gordon felt a true kinship. They were made for each other, Gordon and this building that had fallen so miraculously into his hands. The one thing he had loved his whole life, without any reservation, free of the capacity to disappoint, was The Lodge. The community, like the newspaper and the old Bluebird Literary Institute (now an organic food store), like Bluebird High School and the post office and the police station, had been submerged beneath the Ponzi scheme of real estate tumbling down the headlands. The Lodge was the last remnant of what Gordon considered civilisation. He would save it. As each house was knocked down and the world ‘discovered’ Bluebird, Gordon’s love for The Lodge had hardened into something akin to a mission. Chance had made him the protector of Bluebird, the steward of history.