Kelly wanted to lick up Ben’s tears, steal his pain, keep him in her arms, shield him, leave him pure. This was all she wanted to conserve. Not The Lodge, not Old Bluebird. Just one boy.

‘Where’s Gordon?’ Lou asked.

Kelly pointed. Two ranks of tanned bodies emerged onto the sandbank in a marching formation, rising out of the water like pallbearers. Frontal staggered, half-drowned, at the head of the cortege. Gordon waded behind him.

The men were carrying a body.

‘No,’ Ben said.

‘My love.’ Kelly hugged him and tried to cup her hand over his face, but Ben ripped himself away.

‘No, no, nooooo!’

The carrying party came up the beach. Spectators and carnival participants massed on the sand, thousands more on the dunes and in the car park. Around the high-rise buildings on both headlands, balconies were crowded. Cars were jammed into the bluffs and car parks.

At the centre of this amphitheatre, the carrying party stopped. Kelly heard a moving silence, and then the beginnings of—what—applause? People were clapping these heroes who had brought in Daniel’s body.

‘Wait,’ Ben said. ‘What?’

Above the heads of the funerary procession, a fist was raised. Then a second. The fingers formed the horn sign.

Daniel wasn’t a body; he was a hero. Set down on the sand, he rose in front of the thousands with arms raised. The survivor. The cheering gathered force. Frontal clasped his son’s right hand aloft so they were saluting the crowd together. The marshals escorted the injured crews up to the BSLSC. Faces were smeared with emotion: they had witnessed a dead boy brought back to life! His father had saved him! Kelly felt the tremors of the hero’s welcome engulfing Daniel and Frontal, and within herself, a great swamping wave.

‘Kel.’

It was Gordon, soaking wet and gassed.

‘I thought they’d lost him,’ he said.

Kelly was about to say something cynical about the Abottemey family, how they had, typically, staged their own coronation, pulled off a tricky bait-and-switch on the crowd by reviving Daniel from apparent death. What a scam. But as she looked at Gordon, she saw a grieving old man, his features furrowed, his complexion an atlas of sickly colours.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, clasping his hand. It was wrinkled from the water. She understood. ‘They didn’t lose this one.’

Gordon tried to speak but had to clear his throat, in a harsh self-injuring gouge, before he could get a word out.

‘We’ve lost,’ he said. ‘We’ve lost.’

Kelly gripped his hand between both of hers and rubbed those wrinkles as if she could make him smooth again. She could find no words.

‘Wait, what? No!’

Kelly and Gordon looked at their son.