Old Bluebirders didn’t arrive so much as occur. Tonsure Man, whose stringy beard and luxuriant mullet appeared on loan from the yarmulke of exposed wrinkled-apple skin atop his head, was exchanging information with the tattooed nude-nut Cnut, whose name was likely Canute or Knut, going by his Nordic facial planes, but who spells in the surf? Cnut by nature, therefore Cnut by name. Up popped the obligatory Macca and Chook, one per beach from here to the border, and an interchangeable posse of Maccalikes and Chookalikes. There now was the sole woman in the pack, the eight-time state champ, her ebullient hoarse monologues piercing the morning. Friendly with everyone and remembering no-one’s name, the eight-time champ formed a surf-buddy couple with Japan Ned, a Bluebird resident since the Japanese eighties. Japan Ned had not mastered a comprehensible English beyond ‘Good out’ and ‘Shit out’, all he needed for car park conferences. You lost yourself in contemplation of his carved white grin and his bewitching, almost edible skin tone. It was said that Japan Ned’s nickname originated with a local cabinet-maker and surfer who likened Ned’s complexion—so darkened by daily exposure to a sun that had turned him into a mid-Pacific race all his own—to the colour of japanned wood, but it was also said that none of the local tradies could be quite that eloquent.

This bunch, every morning of the year. Permanent holiday. How did they get away with it?

But yeah, Gordon knew:

Snake, divorced, had moved back to Bluebird to live with his widowed mother.

Red Cap, divorced, also lived with his widowed mother.

Tonsure Man, never married, lived in Bluebird in a bachelor flat beneath his widowed mother’s house.

Cnut, never married, lived in his car.

Firie Sam, divorced, had moved with his widowed father into the disused firehouse.

Japan Ned, who could only be divorced, lived nearby, no-one had worked out where or with whom.

The eight-time state champ had made nothing from the sport but lived on the clifftop, prime possie, doctor’s wife.

And now the turd dropped into the bowl.

Rocking up to work the car park like a party host was Doug ‘Dog’ Gilsenan, a Bluebird lifer who had marked his fiftieth year by switching from surfing to stand-up paddleboarding so he could continue to bully the south-end peak in a world of seven billion potential blow-ins. On big days, small days, in-between days, good days and shit days, Dog, his face a voodoo mask of factor-50 war paint, statuesque on his paddleboard, picked off the best waves, sounding his warning with a shrill whistle as he careered down the line in his budgie smugglers. Dog would fancy himself a marble Caesar, though the parabolic folds of his flesh toga were the legacy of no greater conquest than the recovering sugar user’s weight loss.