Tonsure Man took another thriller off the shelf and waved it questioningly at Gordon, who had read everything. ‘You’ll like that,’ Gordon replied. He moved to the shelf and tightened the books against the obscene $300 bookend, inlaid with New Zealand jade, he had bought from Eastons with the same stolen card he had used for the Kyoto tea set and the Atlas penholder. Gordon gave the bookend a caress, seeking virtue.

Perusing the flyleaf, Tonsure Man said sceptically, ‘I don’t read Australian books.’ Few did. ‘Australian books’ reminded them of school.

‘Trust me, it’ll be worth your while,’ Gordon said, with a keen appreciation of the worth of Tonsure Man’s while.

‘So what you gunna do?’

Tonsure Man had this way of changing the subject without warning onto a larger subject that hovered in his head but required some guesswork to ascertain. It was as if Tonsure Man had been conducting a silent conversation with an imaginary Gordon that he was now setting free without remembering that the real Gordon had not been part of it.

‘About … ?’

‘Everything,’ Tonsure Man said, waving the thick paperback to sum up the vastness of the problem. ‘Red Cap’s old lady, all the old ladies around here, they’d be totally stoked if you could set this up as a proper community centre. You got the machine, Lou’s itching to run the place as a coffee shop, you could do it all, make some cash too.’

‘A community centre.’

‘Fucken access mate,’ Red Cap called from the card table. ‘How are they gunna get up and down the stairs? Even I’m struggling,’ he said, rubbing his destroyed shoulder as if that might soon prevent him from loafing about doing nothing. ‘Josie’s doing it tough, aren’t you, Mum? Nearly fucken kills you to get in and out. Gordo, why don’t you get Mrs C to build one of them travelator things?’

Red Cap called Leonie Chidgey ‘Mrs C’, evoking the image of a plump and jolly grandmother rather than the gym-fit, duckpouty, Botoxed-and-liposuctioned-to-within-an-inch-of-her-life despot who called the shots here.

‘Don’t think they’re called travelators, but I know what you mean,’ Gordon said.

‘Yeah, them chairs you can hop on and press a button,’ Tonsure Man said. ‘Whee! Solve all your access problems, eh.’

Gordon did not see the tortuous access as a problem so much as the best thing The Lodge had going for it.

‘Lou’s a go-ahead chick—you could really make something of it,’ Red Cap said. ‘You just gotta get Mrs C on board. Suck up to the old bird, fucken sort out the ownership.’

‘It is sorted,’ Gordon reminded him.