A bit of an arsehole, to be honest.

‘Why did we do it?’ he asked. ‘Why did we bloody well do it?’

‘Because you’re a fuckwit,’ his travelling companion said.

‘Oh! It speaks!’ Ron said with a sarcastic yelp. He had never liked this fellow. Amazing how the speed of this car worked like a key that unlocked memory. Memory of family, memory of Chester Dam, memory of his travelling companion. Those bad men of Old Bluebird.

There had to be more to it. He had spent most of his life with the penny stuck on the lip of the slot, refusing to drop, the truth frozen forty-two years ago. Of course Owen hadn’t slipped. You could see Gordon was lying the moment he opened his mouth. There had to be more to it. You just had to join the dots. Kids threw themselves off cliffs like it was going out of fashion now. Owen had started it. Pain. In pain.

‘You really are a fuckwit,’ his companion said again, to make sure he was heard.

A peeper, this one. That was all he’d been done for. Had he interfered with Owen? Those bad old men. Bad men kept in power by small men.

He’d have liked to tip the whole bucket on them with that birth certificate, but given how that might affect his own reputation, and spoil young Ben’s day, probably Gordon was right to hold it in reserve, keep it as a threat. Gordon was right! First time for everything!

But this one, this peeper: Ron had a plan for him.

‘Aren’t you listening?’ his companion gurgled.

So consumed was he with thinking up some fitting retort that, as he turned onto the highway, Ron only looked to the north, not the south, and not to the arrow light which, unlike the circular traffic light, was red, and so Ron’s last thought when the Car With No Name was T-boned on its passenger side by an eighteen-wheel semitrailer was that when he got to that service station, he would trick his travelling companion into thinking he could go inside and buy snacks, and while he was inside, Ron would leave him there and head on to Chester Dam all alone, in perfect peace.

PAST ITS BEST

Past its best

Tony Eastaugh’s funeral was a suitably modest affair. His generation was long gone, in honour, dishonour, or simply unaccounted for. Gordon recognised, in the faces in the smallest and cheapest of the available crematorium chapels, friends of Sam, not Tony. The past showed little interest in being preserved. Those men of the past were a figment of the imagination. One poke of a firestick and they went down in minutes, and once they were gone, like The Lodge, those who had kept them alive wondered what all the fuss had been about.