It was the deal of a quarter-century: when Kelly asked, Gordon was not to refuse. He went with her, feeling that this might silence his gasbagging mind, but it didn’t, in the end, he realised as he lay awake four hours later, alone on his bed in the bunk room, so close to the springs of the bunk above that his breath bounced back into his face, the sound of Kelly’s snores next door perforating the asbestos wall; no, it didn’t take any of his troubles away, it only added another.

LAST PART

BIRD’S EYE

Bird’s eye

Dear oh dear. When I said I wanted to do something for Family, I didn’t mean anything so tangible as bringing Gordon and Kelly back together. I’d assumed Gordon’s questionable personal hygiene would cancel out whatever animal sexual pull he and my stepdaughter still exert on each other. What on earth have I done? Have my actions brought them into alliance against a common enemy? (Though I wouldn’t like to be called common.) I can only hope this was an aberration, a mutual lapse in consciousness, or taste.

Talk about shooting myself in the foot! They fear me, they think I control them, and yet when you look at what I have done, each of my moves has back fired. My proxy over The Lodge is in the most unreliable hands, the value of my properties is in freefall, and my foul stepdaughter is—for one night at least—sleeping soundly.

I blame Gordon. The man is a cripple. He carries an inner injury of unknown origin. They are trying to help him, but he will not allow himself to be helped. Maybe, in the name of love, he has a buried urge to bring about their demise. Maybe he has some kind of inherited death drive. I have long held the suspicion that his unconscious will is to love Bluebird, The Lodge, his family, the lot of them, until they die from it.

Who am I to stand in the way of a tribe so hell-bent on their extinction? My lawyer suggests, only half jokingly I fear, that I declare terra nullius over The Lodge and claim it as uninhabited. The man is a scoundrel, but he reads my mood.

I am a migratory wild seabird. I can do nothing for them. Time flies. My season has come.

Such a tease. But this is not the outsider’s story. This is the story of those who are in the middle yet on the margin, the hole in the doughnut, so close to the centre that they have fallen into the void.

Allow us old birds our jollies.

Time for us all to set ourselves free.

A MISUNDERSTANDING

A misunderstanding