He banged the downstairs door with an intentionally heavy ‘Alert! Dad approaching!’ slam. Whenever the crew were upstairs, Ben retreated to do his homework in the damp concrete basement alongside everyone’s dumped shit and unused surfboards. Lou, who was trying to set up a pay-per-use ‘lending library’ of surfcraft, had renamed it the Boardroom. It smelt of salt water and sand and surf wax and fibreglass and wee. Two of its walls were painted in black gloss, as if someone had started on a dungeon but lost the will. Gordon was sad to think that this was where Ben felt most comfortable, but he could see why nobody would want to spend longer than necessary upstairs with that noisy mob or in the bunk room where Ben slept, with Gordon and Lou, like convicts forced to share quarters on an uncomfortable voyage. It dismayed Gordon to sleep in the same room as his son and goddaughter; he shuddered to think how icky it must be for them.

Ben sat with his back to the Boardroom door at the fake-wood school desk Gordon had rescued from the tip and lugged down from Cliff Street to The Lodge at the expense of a slipped disc, an early gesture of post-separation atonement. He had installed it at the Boardroom’s tiny aluminium-framed window, so if Ben craned his neck he could see Bluebird Beach. It was an architectural characteristic of The Lodge’s era to prioritise protection from wind over the view: of the upstairs bedrooms, the two on the beach side of the house, with potentially superb vistas, were each limited to a single, high, narrow pane of frosted glass. Only from the balcony could you know where on earth you were. Downstairs, Ben spent more time on his feet squinting at the waves than on his backside studying. Kelly said it was the worst place to put a desk for a kid with Ben’s condition. But when Gordon had shifted the desk away from the window, Ben moved it back.

To Ben’s right was a handmade American pewter object in the shape of Atlas holding up the world. Atlas’s spread arms, a recent $280 purchase from Eastons, held Ben’s fifty-cent biro. Gordon felt a flush of love for his son, the last person in Bluebird who would think of asking Gordon what was wrong with him. Ben had inherited his mother’s best features—her olive-skinned good looks, her honesty, her fundamental sense of fairness—which offset the selective blindness, proneness to skin infections, indecisiveness, allergy to common sense and other too-florid-to-name legacies with which his Grimes side had lumbered him. ‘Breed with someone better than you!’ Gordon’s father Ronald, a eugenicist tyrant in the twentieth-century tradition, used to bark at him. ‘All the strongest characteristics come down the distaff side!’ Gordon had certainly found someone better than him to breed with, out of his league even, but this beautiful boy was more than enough recompense.