As enrolment procedures were finalised, Pearly thought back to those days. He’d been a bus boy, up early for the trudge to the country corner, wet or shine, home late, but in summer still with chores to do. For his last two years at school his father had let him take the farm bike in on footy-practice days. No pillions, his father had insisted, but a mile down the road Pearly had often picked up Snoz Gazler, who would grip him with one arm and hold their school satchels with the other as the Suzuki 125 skittered through the gravel of the undulating country road. There had been little traffic, but what passed in summer left a long plume of soft and rolling dust, the taste of which was strong for Pearly even in recollection. They’d dumped out once at Coalpit Road corner where Pearly lost control in a swathe of loose shingle, and they ended up in a gorse hedge. They never told anyone, but whenever Pearly passes that corner, where the gorse is long gone, he thinks of the breakneck slide over the gravel and long grass and into the hedge, where Snoz and he lay laughing with relief despite the scratches that drew blood. Memory seizes on such flashpoints of experience. So many times he must have ridden the little four-stroke around that bend, yet his single recollection is of the one occasion things went wrong. A very good kicker, Snoz. Not outstanding as a halfback, but dependable, and his penalties won quite a few games. Pearly hoped he’d be at the reunion — and Gumbo, and Barry Harte and lots of other good guys. It would be a blast, wouldn’t it.

The committee members spent a good deal of time discussing the level of enrolment fees, something of a division developing between those who saw the opportunity for considerable profit and those who thought encouraging attendance more important. Pearly supported the latter view, but was even-handed in his management of debate. Yet all the while at a deeper level he was thinking of much earlier stages of his life. Time seemed to be speeding up, the years slipping by without outstanding trauma, or achievement, to fix enduring tableaux. Surely the decade of his thirties was longer than any of the others? He’d seemed to be thirty-something for a long time: years of achievement, years in which he was closer and more important to his wife and children than he had ever been since, years in which he was still conscious of that peak fusion of mind and body. He hadn’t realised his prime at the time of it of course, but it was clear in retrospect. A period of his life that had a nostalgic luminosity.