‘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?’

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.’