He eased the apparatus into the shed’s interior and untied the broken buggy, resting the boat on the boards his father had laid over the sandy dirt. He gave it a long stare. Wondered where to start, what he should do, knowing the whole time that before he got to work on the boat he needed to finish the shed. It was the clear order of things. He wanted to pour himself into the restoration, but he knew it wasn’t right to start this new job while another remained unfinished. That was the avenue of the lazy, of malingerers. Of the sort of people his father looked down on.

The old man had made it clear that he was too busy to help out now that the frame was up, that the rest of the job was Ned’s. A stepladder was propped against the wall, and beside it lay a pile of planks. Ned knew where others were, up behind the main shed. A jar of nails bristled on the ground.

For two days he worked, following his intuition, not fully knowing what he was doing. Nobody had taught him how to build a shed. He just looked at what his father had already built and imagined a series of steps that needed to be taken next. He hammered planks onto the frame to create a roof. When they didn’t fit, or if he hadn’t positioned them close enough together, he clawed out the nails with the back of the hammer and started again. He did the same with the walls, doing his best to make sure no light or wind cut between the wood. When small gaps where unavoidable he forced offcuts into the holes, wedging and bludgeoning until a seal was formed.

He knew his workmanship was poor. He knew he was rushing. It was obvious which parts of the shed his father had built, and which were his slapdash contributions. There was a shoddiness to his efforts, an ugliness to the lines of the building, and though he told himself it was rustic charm, he knew that was not true. The eaves were of uneven lengths, the walls leaned at unusual angles. He’d blasted open a thumb while aiming at a nail; his blood had sunk into the timber and dried into splashes of lifeless maroon. But he kept lifting and chiselling and hammering and bleeding until there were no holes in the rafters or walls, until he could throw a bucket of river water over the roof and only a few drops fell through to smack at the shed’s interior.