‘Don’t call him that, Ronald.’

‘What?’

‘Let them go, Ben.’

‘It’s a roundabout, Ron.’

‘Bloody useless, the lot of you.’

Ben’s dad had given him one and only one piece of ironclad advice about learning to drive, which was that whoever Ben chose to be his teacher, he should never, under any circumstances, drive with more than one adult in the car.

Now he had three, all yelling at him. Ben would give anything to get his one hundred and twenty hours. Today he was paying full price. His head was still spinning from what had happened at home over the past few days. He needed to be somewhere alone to digest it. Instead he was here, with them.

Grandma and Grandpa were impatient to get to lunch at The Lodge. You didn’t want to make them wait for lunch. Grandpa was in the passenger seat, and behind him Ben’s mum was gazing out the window with a faraway look, taking meditative breaths and letting her eyes half close. Inviting the grandparents for lunch had been an impulsive decision of Mum’s, on the rebound from the emotions of recent days. Ben could see how discombobulated his parents were, how shaken out of their characters. Dad had gone surfing in a big crowd, and Mum had invited Ron and Norma for lunch. Something was not right.

An exuberant Grandpa, who had packed an overnight bag ‘in case I stay for some time’, could not contain himself. He regarded himself as the superior driver in the vehicle and barked instructions at Ben. Even though Grandma wasn’t trying to instruct Ben, she was trying to instruct Grandpa, which was just as bad. Then Mum, out of nowhere, would offer an opinion. Everyone speaking over the top of everyone else was messing with Ben’s head.

‘He has to give way to the right at a roundabout,’ Norma said to Ron.

‘Learn the rules, woman! He only has to give way to traffic that is already on a roundabout!’

Roundabouts were, even more than homophobic schoolkids, the bane of Ben’s life. With his clear head, his Ben head, his no-Vyvanse head, he was coping with most challenges, but roundabouts scrambled him, and now Grandma and Grandpa were making it worse.

‘Your grandfather is right,’ his mum said, re-entering the conversation after taking a moment to reconcentrate her peace of mind in her sacrum. ‘But he’s also wrong.’

From the passenger seat, a snort.

‘Wait, what?’ Ben said, braking hard. Couldn’t they talk about this later? But he couldn’t tell them to shut up when they were all telling each other to shut up.

‘Technically, you do only have to give way to traffic that’s on the roundabout,’ his mum continued. ‘But practically, if the other cars are speeding into it from the right, you’re best giving way to them.’

‘Rubbish,’ Ron said.

‘Oh, do be quiet!’ Norma said to Ron.