Alarm broke over them simultaneously.

‘No, no.’

Gordon began running back up the cart path towards the turning circle.

‘No running on the golf course!’ Norma called as she laboured sideways down the stairs.

‘Dad’s been left alone with a vehicle!’ Gordon shouted. His mother’s hand went to her mouth.

Gordon’s first fear was that Ron would speed off towards the clubhouse, the exit, the street, all the way to Chester Dam. Had Gordon been thinking straight, he would have understood there was no cause for concern on that front: a golf cart could be chased down by an ambulant human, and in any case the electric Bluebird Country Club carts automatically switched off beyond the course’s gates.

Ron’s necessities were darker than escape.

As Gordon rounded the corner of the path, he saw his father, wild glee carved into his face, steering the cart right at him, pedal to the floor. The tinny electronic motor whined like a killer mosquito. Gordon jumped into the groundcover beside the path. His eyes went to the tee box. He could see no-one up there. He shouted a warning anyway, even though he knew what was unfolding. For once, he was ahead of the game.

Whether Ron timed his run in the cart to coincide with Norma’s arrival at the bottom of the stairs, nobody could say in a court of law, but Kelly, Ben and Lou thought they saw him bunch his shoulders and take aim. He met Norma the instant she stepped onto the cart path. Though it wasn’t travelling at great speed, the front wheel of Ron’s cart carried several hundred kilograms of downward momentum. When it clipped Norma’s knee, a sickening crack was heard above the engine’s protests.

Gordon, who came upon the scene last, having dug himself out of the foliage and chased after Ron’s cart, mustered all his strength, all his stubbornness, all his power to deny time and character and reality, to shut out the idea that his father might have done this on purpose. With an effort of will that gave him an instant blinding headache, Gordon thought back to the clubhouse, Norma’s arms around Ron’s neck, laughing and blowing kisses and enjoying the kind of immoderate bliss he had rarely been allowed to see as a child.

And never when he was an only child.

Norma must, he concluded with hope in his heart, have tripped. Fallen without cause, but not without consequence. She hit her head against a rock wall and landed hard on her hip. She already had replacement hips on each side, and her left femur, sandwiched between concrete path and titanium prosthesis, made that terrible shattering noise. She was out cold. Gordon fell to his knees and cradled her head. A grey mouse swelled where her eyebrow had hit the wall.

The cart was upside down, having rolled into a drainage ditch beneath the tee box. Lou and Ben climbed in to fetch Ron, but he was able to crawl from the wreckage under his own steam. He pushed away their assistance and, dusting sprigs of native rosemary off his shirtfront, shuntered up to where Gordon was holding Norma.