Shock pulsed through the crowd. Following the deputy general manager of the council, trained lifesavers swam towards the overturned boats. The crew from last-placed Bondi jumped from their craft to help rescue the Bluebird, Capri and Manly boys. The voice on the loudspeaker was yelling indistinctly and adding to the mayhem.

‘Oh, the humanity.’ Carl was by Kelly’s side. ‘The eternal cycle. Here we are again.’ Hunching into his duffle coat, he walked down the bleacher and, against the tide of people streaming onto Bluebird Beach, made his way up through the car park towards the Bluebird Hilton. Leonie gave Kelly a glance indecipherable behind her sunglasses and hat, and tripped after Carl.

‘Where are Ben and Lou?’ Kelly asked Gordon.

‘They were taking up the girls’ boat, last I saw.’

‘I don’t want him playing the hero or going anywhere near those boys,’ Kelly said with such feeling that Gordon gave her a searching look. ‘Can you go find him?’

In the water, the upturned boats had drifted beneath the cliff ’s edge. Kelly saw a flurry of water in the place—she looked up from the water to the ledge—precisely where, on another windy day, Gordon’s brother had gone off.

Gordon rushed down to the beach where marshals and guards formed a human retaining wall to stop unqualified people from entering the water. He ran around in a rising panic, searching for Ben.

Kelly needed to tell someone: a boy lost his life beneath that ledge.

She could now, from this angle where she had not been in years, read the fat graffiti.

‘Ha,’ she said, involuntarily.

It expressed the full extent of their imagination. It meant nothing. It said:

BLUE BIRD

As if they were dogs, and all they could bark, all they had to say to the world, was: ‘Dog. Dog.’

Injured rowers were being carried to the beach. Lifesavers were shoving each other off their feet to save lives. Some rowers were bleeding and one, in a Capri cap, was carried unconscious by severe-faced professional lifeguards, laid on the sand and tended by paramedics. Marshals manhandled the crowds to make space for an ambulance. Clubs were told to form up for a headcount. From the reassembling Bluebird I team, one crewman was still unaccounted for.

The water was as empty as if there had been a shark alarm. Officials were shouting orders while among those conditioned to obedience a sense of anxious dread had set in around the blue-faced Capri boy with the paramedics, the missing rower from the Bluebird team. Everyone knew. This was a beach where boys died.

‘Mum!’

Ben rushed into Kelly’s arms, his thin shoulders shaking, T-shirt sucking his skin.

‘Mum, it’s Daniel.’ Ben’s voice was muffled against her chest. Lou came up behind Ben, shaking her head gravely.