‘She’s not answering.’ Carl handed back the phone to Gordon, who had re-emerged with three hats. Carl refused to wear one.

‘I’ll text her, tell her we’ll catch her down there,’ Gordon said.

Kelly had forgotten how a carnival in full swing could trigger an involuntary surge of pleasure. Colours flew like flags of the world. The names of the beaches brimmed with a certain magic: Manly, Maroubra, North Curl Curl, Whale Beach, Bronte, Avalon, North Narrabeen … Despite her inner revulsion, she could still be stirred by the rollcall. And then there were the out-of-towners: Thirroul, Old Bar, Merimbula, Tuncurry—music to Australian ears. The beach was a study in organised mayhem. Events were lost in the gigantism of the carnival, as if the racing were incidental to the choreography. There was no scoreboard or central focus, so a visitor would never make head nor tail of who was winning. And yet somehow the clubs knew precisely where they stood and who they wanted to destroy. From the outside, it was sunshine and colours and bodies and logos. Health and service glimmering in their perfect corporate mirror. From the inside, it was kill or be killed.

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.’