She went into the house. It was tempting to go to bed and leave him to the ringing of her last words, but she re-emerged with two fresh bottles, the lids unclipped. She slammed down a third of hers and wiped her mouth on the back of her arm.

‘Fuck it, Gordo, you’re so bloody frustrating. If it’s such a joy for you to be here, why do you spend all day whingeing about how shit it’s become?’

‘I’m a full-time nostalgic. I whinge, therefore I am.’

‘Fuck!’ Kelly made a wild face and pulled at her beer.

‘I’ve been trying to find a way to talk about it with Ben,’ Gordon said. ‘How having been given all these advantages, you’re under pressure to make the best of it. You’re as lucky as anyone who ever lived. So at the end of each day, you think about how you’ve reached another sunset having pissed that luck away. What do you say in the end? I lived at Bluebird Beach. Fuck, I was lucky. Fuck, I did so little with it. See? I feel that pain every day. Otherwise …’

Kelly was looking at him as if, after all this time, he had given her something worth listening to. ‘Otherwise?’

She became freak-outishly aware, for a chilling moment, of his male presence, an arm’s length down the balcony rail. There was such a thin skin between this world and an alternative where they were slipping their clothes over their heads. But not that thin. No, it was a double-brick cement-rendered steel-reinforced wall, going by the name of sanity. Problem was, she was feeling those alternatives to sanity more and more. They spiked through the fabric like spear grass. Was it a sign of mental decay? Was that what she and Dog had given in to that night of the fiftieth—not lust, or fantasy, but an attack of senility?

‘Otherwise you don’t think about it, you just take it as your birthright,’ Gordon said. ‘No peeping below the surface. And that’s the life of a dumb animal. Which is what most people here were like when we were growing up. Still are.’

‘You’re not really nostalgic, though. You hate the old Bluebird.’

‘Some of it’s got to be worth saving.’

‘At what cost? You really want to spend your middle years sucking up to my lunatic stepmother? Do you realise how self-defeating that is? And how it affects Ben?’

She had him there. Here, there and everywhere. Where did she not have him? Any longer, and she would have him handing in the keys tomorrow, fleeing Up North, where there could always be, for Ben, a nice room that wouldn’t double as a shower-toilet.