Bluebird Public School was where he found himself parked. The main school building, in post-war brick, was surrounded by a cordon of demountables erected as stopgaps while the school population boomed in the 1970s. Temporary structures had become permanent, the demountables prettified by a mural-painting project. When Gordon was at the school it was kindy to grade six, but its five-hundred-child capacity could now barely house kindy to grade two. The other thousand students had been shipped off to the spanking-new district primary school, adjacent to the selective high school formerly known as Bloodbath High, and when the latest wing was finished, the younger kids would move over there and Bluebird Public would be no more. The land had been sold to developers for conversion into upmarket townhouses, sold off the plan, the profits pocketed before the last class was taught. Who, Gordon wondered, are all these people moving in? Where do they come from and will they ever stop? The coast was a beautiful thing, but the coast was a frontier. Land ended here. While people came to enjoy the limitlessness, what they experienced was the sense of being hemmed in. There was nowhere in Ocean City more claustrophobic than the seaside.

On his passenger seat lay a gift, an expensive glass vase of Nordic design, that he had bought for Norma, an apology for not seeing her, with a secondary purpose as a self-prodding prop. The thing had been bought; therefore, it had to be given to her; in order to give it to her, he had to visit her. Gordon’s mind had developed an eccentric logic. The gift had a complicated provenance. He had ridden across the harbour to Ocean City on a premium-service Fast Ferry card to make his latest grossly expensive purchase from Eastons, the high-end homewares store from which he had bought the Kyoto china, the Atlas penholder and the French jacquard tablecloth. Six months earlier, he had come into possession of both the Eastons charge card and the Fast Ferry annual pass. He didn’t need or want either, and it aggrieved him that he had not come into possession of cards that might obtain things his family needed or, what he really required, cash to pay his bills. Homewares! Fast Ferry trips! Talk about the universe playing a cruel joke. But he felt a solemn duty to use the cards, and sometimes they served their mysterious purpose.

‘I bought Mum a present,’ he said aloud.

As a motivational speech, it didn’t quite work. He couldn’t bring himself to undo his seatbelt.