He had worked all his life for the Bluebird Building Society, of which his father Tony had been the local branch manager. Acquired by one of the Big Four mega-banks during the financial shakeout of the 2000s, the building society’s shopfront in Bluebird was shut down, sold off and converted into apartments, but the name was kept alive as a ‘virtual branch’, staffed by no-overheads loans officers like Sam, peddling the mega-bank’s products under the Bluebird Building Society letterhead. Sam did take a few liberties, lending to his friends, cutting corners, or, as he put it, Keeping Local Alive. As Sam saw it, the mega-bank couldn’t have it both ways: it couldn’t keep marketing the BBS as the ‘locals only’ branch and not allow some tolerance for the clients who made the society what it was. And besides, half his BBS workmates were making profits for the bank by selling life insurance to dead people.

Sam wrestled the screen door open and ushered Gordon inside. The firehouse comprised two empty offices, now makeshift bedrooms, and a large meeting room with a window overlooking the back of the dunes and the BSLSC. Gordon dragged a desk chair out of one of the offices; the Bluebird fire station had become redundant since the consolidation of the beaches’ services into a ‘superstation’ two suburbs north, where the fire engines, equipment and professional firemen were based. With professionalisation and corporatisation, the volunteer rural fire service to which Sam had belonged had been disbanded. In the country Gordon grew up in, firemen, like soldiers, were grumpy mavericks with chips on their shoulders; now they were male models in tight overalls, superheroes in superstations.

He followed Sam into the kitchenette, a bench against the clubroom’s western wall equipped with a single sink, oven, one-burner stove and mini-fridge. Sam had enhanced it with a small espresso maker. Soon he conjured two unexpectedly authentic flat whites.

‘Get this inna ya.’

‘Everyone’s a fricken barista,’ Gordon said.

Gordon and Sam sat and sipped and looked at the back wall of the surf club.

‘Shit of a day,’ Gordon said, smiling at the pebbly rain drumming the window.

‘Just how we love it.’

‘Remember how we used to think those old pricks were mad, running down in their budgies to swim the bay on days like this?’

‘Yeah and we’re those old pricks now.’ Sam raised his cup. ‘Toasting each other with coffee. What the fuck’s the world come to?’