He swept his eyes over the beach. Six ancient clubbies were practising their march-past, pausing around the reel to debate who would pick up which corner. Six into four never did go. Mathematics, like their opinions, stood immutably against progress. Gordon squinted down at the top car park, where his crew had been rolling up since the pre-dawn. He could pick them out of the Sunday crowd just as animals, in a mass of humans, see only the fellows of their species. Morning surfs complete, they milled about, a cluster of non-working working folk falsely remembering empty waves, bandying hot air and urban myth.

Snake, tradie in tradies’ heaven, first in the car park as usual in his customised van fitted out with shadow boards for metalwork tools and a seven-stick surfboard quiver, was flying on a vertical run of surf talk with Red Cap, a fifty-one-year-old who no longer surfed because of reconstructed shoulders dangling from synthetic tendons, yet still the most regular of the regulars. On days like this, Snake and Red Cap claimed the sunrise like respondents to a call to prayer; if they were not first here, the Bluebird sky might fall in.

Firie Sam clambered up the dune path to join their conversation around the green-painted park chair that Kelly had christened The Bench of Broken Dreams. Mid-fifties, handlebar moustache and fruity voice box, mobile loans officer by day, safety officer with the volunteer rural fire service by days off, an anomalous Old Bluebirder in gainful employ, Firie Sam was unzipping his sleeveless vest, its shine like sealskin. Nobody knew how Sam maintained a supply of that discontinued line of zipper vests; there were rumours of a long-ago stock theft.