She carried lattes in Duralex tumblers to the living room for Josie and Tonsure Man. To Red Cap’s abject look, she said, ‘Okay, okay,’ and came back to the machine.

‘You didn’t answer.’

‘Didn’t answer what?’ Gordon said.

‘Do you ever listen?’

For thirty years his wife had been asking this, as if their marriage were a royal commission into the question of whether Gordon Grimes ever listened. In his defence, Gordon thought it was more complicated than not listening—more a matter of his declining ability, with age, to do two things at once: listen, for example, while thinking. But explaining that to Kelly, or now to Lou, was to confirm that he was not only a man who didn’t listen but one who believed it was somehow correct and justifiable and interesting that he didn’t listen.

‘Well, the big town at Beckham is still the perfect site when they test a neutron bomb. Take out the humans, it’d be paradise. Ben didn’t like it either. Too many white witches.’ Ben had been scared by the kids his own age with the weary eyes of under-aged burnouts. ‘But he loves where we go, to the camp on the lagoon.’

‘He said you looked ten years younger the moment you cracked your first home-brew. He told me you’d be happier if you moved there. He said you could buy that newspaper your cousins have been trying to sell.’

‘Ben’s my life coach now.’

Lou shot him a savage look, warning him not to belittle his son, least of all when he had better ideas than Gordon’s. She took a fresh latte to the living room for Red Cap.

‘There’s a reason they can’t find a buyer,’ Gordon called after her.

After setting up a vet practice a few years earlier, Rachel and Jason had indulged themselves and bought the Northern Daily, a two-town five-sheet rag, at one minute to print media’s midnight. Gordon had made the mistake of confiding in Ben his casual dream of taking over the Daily from his cousins, overseeing its conversion to digital, and entering semi-retirement as an Up North micro-magnate. His big mouth. Ben must have told Lou, who wasn’t the first woman to seize one of Gordon’s rare moments of candour and bang him over the head with it.

‘You only need to admit to yourself that you hate it here.’ This was Lou, back in the kitchen. ‘You don’t surf anymore. Too many people, too claustrophobic. All you lot talk about is how much better Bluebird was in the old days. Okay, so stop mourning the past, pack up and go Up North, do yourself a favour!’

‘I can’t go while my parents are still …’ Gordon almost said ‘alive’, but he didn’t quite mean it like that. Or he didn’t want to sound like he meant it like that.