‘I thought you were going to say with Ricky the assistant pro. That was my dud date tonight.’

‘You can have all the assistant pros you like. After thirty years of me, I’m not going to begrudge you a bit of fun,’ Gordon said. ‘Actually, I don’t mean that. I’m saying it because I want to sound grown up.’

What had their sex life dwindled to? The unspoken contract, since early in their married life, that she would never say yes and he would never say no. There might also be a question of what he deserved after so many years of that.

‘Yeah, Sally,’ she croaked through her smoke. ‘She wanted to take me down, right there on the seventeenth green. She was blowing up about the charges on Dog’s Eastons card. She reckoned it was me! And then your mum stepped in.’

‘I wish I’d been there.’ Gordon looked at her and grimaced. ‘Not really.’

‘Don’t underestimate your mother,’ Kelly said. ‘She’s still got a few surprises in her.’

‘Such as?’

Kelly gave an enigmatic one-shoulder shrug, rearranged the spaghetti strap that had slipped down her upper arm, and blew smoke at Bluebird Bay.

‘Let’s just say that not looking after your department store charge cards ranks pretty highly in your mother’s scale of no-nos. It wasn’t “You ought to keep a closer eye on your husband”, it was “You ought to be ashamed of not keeping an eye on your Eastons card”. But hey, your parents have been through a lot.’ She sharpened her eyes at Gordon, who ducked his head. ‘We do need to talk about it, darling. You, me, Ben.’

‘Do you think Carl’s okay?’ Gordon said to shift them off his fucked-up family and onto hers.

Kelly dragged smoke into her sacrum. The window into Gordon’s soul had cracked open back there with Ron. Maybe Ron deserved credit. But it had snapped shut again. Good old Gordon. That’s all right, she thought. We’ll get there. The three of us.

‘My brother? If you mean what part of the cycle he’s in, no, I don’t think he is okay. This is how it starts. He’s fine for months, and then something sets him off and you can count down the days until he gets locked up. You know,’ she said, contemplating her roach, ‘when he says that smoking so much weed has no effect on his mental state, we’ve always laughed at him. It’s like, you idiot, you really are in denial. But I can see what he means. If you took the weed away from him, he’d still go through the cycles, the triggers would still set him off. Who knows? It might even be good for him.’ To congratulate herself on her insight, she took another drag.

‘I didn’t think he was smoking,’ Gordon said.