The thing about villages inside rapidly changing cities was you didn’t need to move if you wanted to escape your past. You could stand right where you were, and history would change around you. In the eyes of New Bluebird, Tony Eastaugh was a generic cranky old man, anonymous, one of a dying breed. To Old Bluebird, to Gordon and Sam and Gordon’s parents and Dog and Tonsure Man and their widowed mothers and all the rest of them, it was all so fucking long ago. Memory was erased by the salt- and sand-bearing wind that rubbed away the names of the dead on the Anzac memorial statue in front of the surf club. It was like Red Cap and his sacking from the education department. The past meant everything, and yet it wasn’t worth a pinch of shit. Everyone forgot. Tony was just some old guy with a plastic foot taking a bog on the other side of a too-thin door.

It was gangrene, in the end, that did for Tony’s left foot. But it had never been quite right after that episode in the surf club showers. The bones never healed.

‘Earth to Gordo, come in?’

Sam was sitting across the table with his laptop open at the Bluebird Building Society page. He was typing himself into some hidden sanctum, the magic pudding of mortgage refinancing, in the confines of which, concealed by who knew what disguise, Sam would transform Gordon’s equity in The Lodge into a deposit in his savings account. When they’d begun, Sam had promised that this little trick could be done ‘until the cows come home’. Gordon watched Sam’s spotted fingers tapping the keyboard. Sam wasn’t saying that anymore.

‘Right, I’m in.’ Sam scrolled through a complexly arranged page of columns and numbers and let out a concerned whistle. ‘You’re drawn right down to your limit, my friend. No more piggy bank for you at that valuation.’

‘Shit.’ Gordon scratched his groin and tried to decipher what he was seeing on the screen. ‘I didn’t realise.’

‘Not a problem, let me just …’ Sam whirred through a series of boxes in what Gordon took to be a flow chart of questions and formulae, but Sam’s fingers and the screen were moving too rapidly for Gordon to understand anything except the number he saw pop up at the end.

‘Hang on, did you just make my—did the value of my share in The Lodge just go up by … by that much? How do you do that?’

‘I do it because I am a Fucking. Top. Bloke,’ Sam said absently, focused on the screen. Now he looked up at Gordon. His eyes were an old man’s. Across the room, the toilet flushed. ‘Quick and lively, brother. How much do you need?’

RONALD

Ronald