He slumped into the belief that Lomita had just given up on the idea of viewing his father’s paintings and didn’t have it in her heart to tell him. No, she said she would. He wanted his father’s work to be a wonder, so he could see that he hadn’t been destroyed. Lost his spirit: destroyed by his son. He sat on the stone paving at the back, by the rolled umbrella in a concrete stand. Was he blaming the wrong man?

After a long and numbing sit, he left the house with a vocalised goodbye, sending it to his father; he walked the length of Ocean Avenue, heading for Chez Jay’s, the bar where his father spent hour after hour and where Ever felt so grown up whenever he joined him. He thought it was the most beautiful walk.

He remembered that when he first got to the top of the hill and saw the palm trees, tall and tropical growing out of their grass surround, he thought the beach, the sand, was just the other side.

His father took him to the edge and, as Ever repeated the move now, that feeling, of immense disappointment, that there was a long drop down to a busy road, Pacific Coast Highway, then some houses and then the beach, hit him afresh.

*

At the bar he ordered a beer with a tequila chaser and decided to drink.

Maybe a lucidity would appear through the haze of alcohol. After three more beers and the equal amount of tequila, life had taken a propeller turn, a full turn to the other end of the spectrum.

People were filling up the bar as late afternoon set in.

Ever, now, at 4.15, this minute, hated the world and all that was in it.

The complicated artistry of the outside of the bar was pure 1950s architecture: the horizontal yellow neon Chez, the vertical and larger turquoise neon of Jay, iconic enough to survive when the rest of the old buildings had been razed to the ground and new development had erupted. An anonymous development. The brutality inside of the crude wooden tables was too much of a conflict with the outside and anyway the people were horrible.

What was going on with these people in the bar? Maybe they could solve his problem once and for all.