Why, after how I stitched you up in court, do you listen to a word of my so-called legal advice?

Why haven’t you thrown me off this balcony for what I did to you?

Why don’t you max out my Fast Ferry and Eastons cards—why do you make such pitiful token purchases when you could really get me in the shit with Sally?

And one last question.

‘Fuck! Holy fucking fuck!’

Dog was smacking at his thigh. He ran down the external stairs to the shower, swearing noisily. His unextinguished roach had ignited his board shorts. His pants were on fire.

Gordon leant over the rail.

Dog howled in pain. His board shorts and shirt were soaked. ‘Fucken fuck this!’

There were only one or two times in a life, Gordon thought, when you felt you had the power of magic.

Dog saw him leaning over the rail. Perhaps he didn’t like the smug look on Gordon’s face. Perhaps he had remembered what he meant to ask.

‘Why are you letting everyone else fuck up their lives trying to help you? Eh, champ? What makes you so special?’

Gordon turned his back on Dog and went into the party to look for Sam.

THE CLIFF

The cliff

Gordon tapped Sam on the shoulder.

‘A word?’

‘Brother, I thought you’d never ask. Outside?’

‘Not here.’

Under a fingernail moon they crossed the beach and climbed the rocks behind the ocean baths and the ‘marina’, a shed and concrete ramp for launching shit-tin dinghies. It was still there, the marina, long after they’d stopped the boats.

Sam was limping from a fin-cut to the arch of his foot he had sustained while surfing. They climbed past the RSL, which was undergoing a renovation paid for by three towers of home units and townhouses in construction on its adjoining land. No words were needed for where Gordon was taking him. It was years since they had been to the sad place, the bad place. In the old days, they used to come up each anniversary, to sit and let their legs swing off the ledge, feeling the pull. Sam felt that pull again now. They stepped across the narrow sandstone bridge from the tip of the headland. The moon lit the rocks. Sam sat beside Gordon on the ledge. Their blood pooled in the bottoms of their feet. Sam rubbed his aching fin-cut.

‘So it’s true?’ Gordon said.

Sam confirmed Gordon’s fears. All too late, Sam had figured out Leonie’s plan. She had guessed that Gordon would eat the house and that Sam would enable him by stealthily revaluing his share. She would buy Gordon’s debts for one dollar, and his share of the trust would, thanks to Sam’s dodgy valuations, be worth three times what it was when she gave it to him. That extra couple of million would then finance operations at the Hilton.