Gordon felt a little happier to hear his father abuse Frontal. Ron had never held anything but contempt for that family. ‘Kid’s a knob, just like his knob old man,’ Ron used to say. Even though the position of council manager was not a hereditary one, Frontal had inherited enough of his late father’s fanaticism about rules to make it inevitable that he would one day succeed to the position Conal had held. As town clerk, Conal had ruled Bluebird and the surrounding beaches with a reinforced concrete fist for twenty-seven years. Ron Grimes, as an engineer, had butted heads with Conal in battles that the town clerk invariably won, which confirmed Ron’s oft-repeated assertion: ‘Money doesn’t mean power. Power means power.’ In Conal’s time, the town clerk had not been a highly paid position, so for him there was no pleasure richer than pushing around developers who could buy and sell him. Conal was incorruptible—the ever-flowing source of his pride. Bribes, paid by developers to councillors, were the great bogey of Conal’s professional life, and as a cleanskin he was able to retire with his head held high—only for a few weeks, however, before keeling over from a cerebral haemorrhage, as if the town clerkship had been safely clotting his blood for all those years.

Another frustrated growl came from the bathroom. Frontal asked through the door if Ron was okay.

‘This place rations toilet paper like there’s a war!’

Frontal was picking up the phone to call the nursing desk when Gordon said wearily, ‘Look left, Dad. Rolls are stacked on the cleaning brush.’

Frontal was equally sanctimonious but much better paid than his father. Now that government salaries were benchmarked against the private sector to attract ‘the best talent’, the head counts and budgets of the new supa-councils validated bloated contracts for council managers. As deputy general manager, Frontal was earning four times a teacher’s salary and double a hospital doctor’s. If he became general manager, he would double this again. A council general manager earned fifty percent more than the Prime fucking Minister. If the council went through another merger, Frontal would earn as much as a banking executive. Exorbitant pay for public servants had been justified as an anti-corruption measure, inoculating them against bribes. In Gordon’s view, the best insurance against corruption was to hire people who weren’t corrupt. For all his other failings, Frontal was not corrupt, so paying him handsomely was a waste of ratepayers’ money and a form of corruption itself, as it raised the cost of anti-corruption insurance beyond the actual risk of corruption.

Ron staggered out of the bathroom as if from a Russian winter campaign. ‘Holy God, there’s some cleaning up to do in there.’ Spotting his Scotch on his bedside table, he proceeded at full shuffle.