Frontal and Daniel had been given time off from work and school to deal with the issue, but there official responsibility ended. Daniel had disappeared, and now Frontal was squatting in the dune grass of Bluebird Beach, binoculars on The Lodge. He spied Kelly, whom Gordon had never deserved, climbing the stairs to Cliff Street. Still looked great, still wouldn’t give Frontal the time of day. For Kelly, read the whole world. Gordon the deadbeat was always forgivable; Frontal the servant of the community, never. Gordon gets the girl. Well, fuck you very much, Gordo.

Was all that old shit coming back again?

He knew he’d never had a chance with Noel Chidgey’s daughter. She and Doug Gilsenan formed a royal couple through high school. She was The Prize, and Frontal was A Bystander. He sublimated his crush on Kelly into a higher feeling: his duty. He only ever came out with his feelings to Kelly once, when he confessed, in year twelve, that if only she were a Christian like him, she would be the perfect human being. Frontal blushed at the memory. Kelly had accepted the compliment in her usual way, laughing it off. ‘Nobody can be perfect,’ she said.

She sure wasn’t. Gilsenan dumped her at the altar, and she fell into the arms of the luckiest loser. Gordon Grimes would have done everyone a favour if he had died as a teenager, like his brother. As things turned out, Gordon earned an undeserved tragic glamour, the overhang of Owen’s accident. To Frontal’s frustration, Gordon, who had cruised through an untouched life, delivering nothing more than he had promised, who was both remembered and, because he hung around, forgotten, won The Prize. What a fucking injustice. While Frontal had taken the best possible revenge—he excelled in economics and joined Capri Council as a graduate cadet; he became an elder in the Bluebird parish committee and vice-president of the surf club; he had gone away, something the Gordons of the world never had the balls to do, and been afflicted by his own personal tragedy, which nobody cared about—Gordon had remained here, a local hero. Local dero more like it. Somehow Gordon ended up in The Lodge. And now, as Frontal’s personal observations last night had disclosed, Kelly was sleeping with him again! Fucking Gordon!

He focused his binoculars. Kelly went up the high stairs to where that lesbarista, the whatever she was, worked on that mechanical chair for invalids. They stopped and talked. Laughter. That’d be right: celebrating Frontal’s downfall. Kelly continued up the stairs, disappearing behind Archer David’s now disused mini-skip.

How in fuck’s name did they get away with it? As his father had told him, only a corrupt pre-war council could have let The Lodge get built. If only a deputy general manager had the retrospective powers to reverse historic offences. Never mind, he thought. A dish best served cold.