As Gordon watched Tony disappear into the bathroom, he wondered, not for the first time, if Tony’s enmity towards him originated from something Gordon had done. No; from a specific thing Gordon had done back when Tony was Lord and Master of Bluebird Beach, captain and then president of the BSLSC, head of Rotary, vice-president of the Returned Servicemen’s League, and general all-round cock of the walk, when the young boys had beheld him as a beachside deity with his barrel chest, when he bestrode Bluebird like the triplet brother of Dennis Lillee and the Marlboro Man. Every big knob from the mayor to the local member was in Tony’s grip. His rule was unquestioned—except, of course, by Sam, who had once confided to Gordon that ‘being my dad’s son, everyone says it’s like being the son of God, but it’s more like being the son of a priest’. Gordon had only deciphered this allusion after a night when, aged eight, he had been showering after board training. The surf club showers were a confusing place for him from the start, where males of every age, seven to seventy, mixed in all their glory. Though he had grown uneasily accustomed to the diversity of old men’s shapes and sizes, Gordon had never seen Sam’s father in the showers. The skanky changing room seemed beneath Mr Eastaugh’s dignity. Gordon had not seen him that night either. The older boys had had their showers, and then Gordon had taken his turn before needing to use the toilet cubicle. Sam and Owen routinely pissed in the shower, teasing young Gordon for being the only person in the club who was too squeamish to use it as a second urinal. In the cubicle, he became aware that through one of the bored-through holes in the particle-board partitions an eye was staring at him. A watery unblinking blue eye. Nobody had come in or out since the older boys had showered. The eye had been there all along.

Gordon looked down and saw, beneath the partition, a pair of horned bare feet the colour of tobacco-stained teeth. He raised his heel and stomped on one of the feet as hard as he could. His heel crunched against a joint that felt like an ankle, which buckled sideways. There was a muffled grunt and Gordon heard the slap of naked buttock on wet concrete floor. Gordon ran all the way home in the dark, bunching his clothes across his middle, too scared to even get dressed. He never told his parents. He told Owen, who laughed and told Gordon something he didn’t quite understand about showering alone in the surf club. Gordon never had the chance to ask his big brother what he meant.

The next week, Gordon was on his way home from school when, outside the Bluebird Building Society, he passed Mr Eastaugh. Sam’s father’s ankle was in a plaster cast.