Letting Max take the first swim at the busy city beach, Damien stood guarding the surfboards. There was no way to lock them in the car; they poked up in the way of the retractable roof. He hadn’t had a reason to take his board out of its foil bag or the inside layers of bubble wrap and foam. Inside all the wrapping was a beautiful six-foot thruster, with a rounded tail and slender rails, hand-made to order by a shaper on Sydney’s northern beaches. He ran a hand over Max’s board, a chunky older model, and shook his head at the thought of how it would handle in big surf. The bulk of it would make it easy for his cousin to get a wave, but it would be hard to duck-dive under waves of any size.

The day cooled as a breeze picked up, flapping the shade cloths on the sand. At the sight of rainclouds in the distance, Damien skipped his swim so they could get going again. With Max back driving, they tried to find common ground on music and finally, giving up, settled on the radio. The station played recent pop interspersed by the sputtering commentary of the local announcers, who spoke with so much excitement that to Damien’s ears they sounded like they were hyperventilating.

‘This research contract you mentioned,’ he said, talking over the sound. ‘Back in France next week. Is that what you’re doing, now you’re done with business school?’

Max kept his eyes on the road. ‘I’ve applied for positions with some companies,’ he said. He added that he had spent most of the summer doing an internship for a ratings agency, and he had lined up some research work on contract for an EU business unit that would tide him over for a few months. ‘Papa EU will provide,’ he joked with affection. ‘What about you? How’s work?’

Damien shut his eyes a moment, thinking of what to say. His work was mapping gradients using computer models, not the easiest thing to explain. A lot of the time, he spent his days at huge open-cut mines. Their scale was impossible to convey to anyone who hadn’t seen them: the open-bellied earth, the trucks with tyres the size of an ordinary car. At work, he stayed in a cabin like a shipping container, airtight and self-contained, marooned in the desert as if by a giant tide. They (or we: he was part of it) were digging out iron ore. It mostly went to China. It went into furnaces there and came out as bright new steel for construction, factories, new cars off the lot.