‘Ar, that fucken bullshit.’ Tonsure Man flicked an angry hand, and to be honest, Gordon couldn’t have phrased it better. ‘It can’t be spread among the three of youse. If you’re not careful you won’t have any choice: we’ll be forced out and the whole place’ll be gone. Fucken shitten fuck!’

Tonsure Man’s eyes filled at the emotion of, first, losing The Lodge, which like other locals he regarded as his birthright, and second, of losing it to the real enemy, the money that landed in Bluebird freshly laundered and itching to renovate. As usual with TM, the finer points of the argument were jumbled but the thrust was well-intentioned.

‘It’s not right,’ Red Cap continued, subsiding into the ratty cane sofa beside Tonsure Man, who was using the Australian novel as a fan. And it’s also not right, Gordon thought, what they say about small communities trapping people in their past. Red Cap, a maths teacher at Bluebird High before Bloodbath turned selective, had slept with a final-year girl student, which made him technically a child sex offender and earned him the sack from the education department and a two-year good behaviour bond from the District Court. That was twenty years ago, and Red Cap had never held down a steady job since. Unemployment had turned him into a full-time surfer, but he had over-surfed and ruined his shoulders beyond even medical science’s capacity for repair, so, like his unfortunate former student, he was fucked every which way. Yet he’d not done what someone in his position with any sense of shame did, which was move away and start up a life where nobody knew him, a new identity, maybe even a different-coloured cap. Instead, Red Cap had stayed put. If your small circle is inside a huge city, the past doesn’t necessarily stick to you: people churn through and those who stay are so dizzied by the ambient change that they cling tight and forget each other’s blemishes. The disgraced are your neighbours, but time closes around their disgrace. Everyone remembered that there was something about Red Cap, but anything else was mere details. New people came in, like Japan Ned and Cnut and Snake, who wouldn’t give a fuck about Red Cap’s past. The important thing to them was not some silly shit he did in the 1990s, but the fact that he was in the top car park every morning at The Bench of Broken Dreams, talking surf, chained with them to this beach and this great tree, The Lodge, that they would not allow to be cut down.

And Gordon, too. Memory was everywhere and nowhere, a suffocating blanket one minute, a puff of cloud the next. He too carried an aura of ‘bloke who’s done stupid shit way back’, but who remembered exactly what?