Enter the love of my life. Could I have pulled strings on that force of nature? Patriarch, businessman, Mason and sometime mayor Noel Chidgey was said to sit up in The Lodge like the Prime Minister in Canberra. Noel was, if nothing else (and many said he was exactly that: nothing else), lucky, selling his automotive business at the top of the lubricants and brake fluids cycle before his annexure of a controlling stake in the Bluebird Hilton. Soon after, alcohol and gaming laws were favourably reformed and Ch-, as they said, ching! Noel and his first wife of sainted memory, Gladys (nee Mishra), raised their children Kelly and Carl in The Lodge until Gladys died from a burst aortic aneurysm at forty-five. Cue violins. Carl and Kelly were reaching adult age and, without Gladys’s unifying love, the Chidgey family spun centrifugally: Kelly from a planned into an unplanned marriage; Carl to the mysterious exile of a university arts degree on the far side of Ocean City, none of the family quite sure if he had gone boho or hobo; Noel to increasingly frequent grieving widower’s holidays in exotic locations, which may or may not have started before he became said grieving widower.

During one of these trips, or possibly an earlier visit, Noel met a twice-divorced accountant named Leonie. I enter the story—finally! A respectable period having passed since Gladys’s death, I demanded Noel take our private arrangement public. Having hooked Noel and moved to Ocean City, I went full stepdragon, treating Kelly as more step than daughter, a contempt that was mutual, for Kelly dismissed me as a living insult to the holy memory of the unimpeachable Gladys. I viewed Kelly as a spoilt heiress and carrier of that peculiar strain of bigotry, the dark-skinned racist, the minority minority-hater, the recent arrival whose loathing was aimed at the more recent. Finding Kelly’s assumptions of Australian racist prerogatives wonderfully comical, I could never resist the temptation to bait her. You will have to forgive me my leisure activities.