Hours later, when the sliding door opened and closed and he heard Kelly trip on that same Shitfuckerpoobum and swear quietly and go to the bathroom they all shared and then her bedroom, he was still awake, fizzing with worry, cataloguing the number of ways in which he was well and truly fucked. He felt the presence of that shadowy man, that faceless nightclub bouncer, standing in the doorway between himself and sleep. Gordon still hadn’t worked out a way past him. It was a waiting game, and at this stage of life waiting was the only skill he had left. He set himself for an all-night face-off.

Kelly’s bed wheezed as she flopped onto it. He heard her cough and sniff, or maybe sob. He looked across the bunk room at Ben, who hadn’t moved: a sure sign that he was still awake. Above him Lou sighed, conscious, impatient with her thoughts. It was after midnight and that made four of them, each unhappy in their own way, lying on their backs, listening to each other’s breath.

NEXT PART

BIRD’S EYE

Bird’s eye

How do they get away with it? Truth be told—and this should be apparent after spending one day in his worn-out thongs—Gordon is getting away with nothing. Day by day, dollar by dollar, degree by degree of slope in that living room floor, Gordon is failing at the Bluebird way of life. He is failing to get away with it.

Though I would like to think of myself as a benign seagull, or even, in my moments of flushed self-regard, a guardian angel hovering over Gordon, from down there I am seen as a wicked witch, long-nosed with a wart on my chin, malevolent on my flying broomstick.

Yet I am as much a passenger of history as they, powerless to change The Lodge’s character. History is an elephant, plodding to its destination, and we are fleas riding on its skin. Ancient as I am, could I have done anything about the Great Depression, when The Lodge was abandoned by its first owners and fell into disrepute as a tramps’ camp? In the late 1940s it was turned over to the Returned Servicemen’s League for diggers to dry out and, like the driftwood cladding, die in the sun. It was then that the building gained its name; at arbitrary hours of the month the diggers’ home became the meeting house of a breakaway chapter of the local Freemasonry. By the 1960s, the official Masonic Lodge, a neoclassical showpiece of the ambitious seaside metropolis Capri, aggressively requisitioned the house and sold it to the Chidgey family of automotive lubricants and brake fluids fame. Was that my fault too?