Ron’s yellowish-crimson colour didn’t change, but an agitation in his fingers and neck indicated a rising tide of head piss. Gordon couldn’t figure out what professional services, engineering or otherwise, his father believed he might offer. Ron had the confidence of the made-good, even if his financial success as a small cog in big wheels and his prudential planning had provided a storehouse of funds that was now—bitter irony—paying his nursing home fees. If only he ran out of money, he could escape from the home. Just as well he lacked the insight to see this.

‘And you could start by contacting the JPA,’ Ron concluded. ‘Council and the courts would take you more seriously if you were a person of character.’

As a JP, Ronald had always placed a high value on character, an even higher one on having a certificate to prove it. A great revelation of Gordon’s childhood relationship with his father was when he, Owen and Sam were punished for trying to burn down the fire station. After they turned themselves in, Tony Eastaugh went on a rampage of self-righteousness and convened an extraordinary general meeting of the surf club to expel the boys. It was a bullshit overreaction, but Mr Eastaugh was running for re-election and fancied campaigning as the president brave enough to punish his own son. The meeting was halfway through when Ron Grimes stood up and delivered an oration of Churchillian impact. He confronted Mr Eastaugh with evidence that fire-lighting had been a ‘rite of passage’ for generations of surf club members. Ron called in former surfboat crewmen and captains who confirmed the tradition. He produced signed affidavits from clubbies who could not attend. There were even suggestions that Mr Eastaugh himself had taken part, if not during his youth then as a ‘mentor’ to younger arsonists. The expulsion move backfired on Mr Eastaugh, who cut the meeting short and let the boys off with a reprimand, the first crack in the eventual shattering of the edifice that was King Tony of BSLSC.

Gordon had revered his father for outgeneralling such a huge personage. Yet, over the years, as Gordon told people about the episode, it began to seem less admirable. Ron had styled himself as the incorruptible advocate of personal responsibility, yet his shining paternal moment was to spare the boys a punishment which even Ron acknowledged they deserved. If accountability was life’s keystone, the boys should have been expelled from the BSLSC. They had lit the fire. Being the one to raise the alarm didn’t excuse Gordon. But Ron had stood up for them, and won. Gordon had taken his father’s actions as a valuable lesson about fighting the power and not letting hypocrites win, but over the years, he understood that Ron had taught him a slightly different lesson: that those in power always have a weak spot, and suborning them was how you survived. Not character, but leverage.