Lucy’s phone buzzes. It’s a text from Flo, although she suspects it’s actually from Harry. Lucy’s pretty sure Flo doesn’t know how to text. All it says is: Tonight?

It was windier, earlier on. But now it’s late afternoon and, though it’s still choppy, the surface of the ocean isn’t coarse; rather, it’s smooth like glass. In the low light the stacked silhouettes of Bruny Island, which edge the oceanic horizon, are mauve and plum. Flo, Harry and Lucy are in the tinny—Gray’s old tinny, the tinny Flo rarely uses but hangs onto for the boys, whenever they’re down; the tinny Harry’s taken over since he got back. They’d driven to the other side of the peninsula to launch the boat and now are puttering out to a little island. Flo and Lucy are perched on the front bench seat and the metal is cold and unforgiving beneath their rumps as the boat bashes through the chop. Harry’s at the tiller, and on the floor, between them, is a mess of fishing paraphernalia.

‘No harm in setting the pot and net while we’re out there,’ he’d mumbled before they left. ‘Don’t have high hopes for the pot. I mean, it’s barely even a day shot but it’s still got bait from last night and, anyway, it gives us a bit of a cover story.’

‘Touch wood,’ Lucy had said. But the new jetty was metal and concrete and the nearest tree was ages away, so she didn’t.

They slip and bang towards the island. Flo and Lucy brace themselves, relax, brace themselves, relax, brace themselves as swell and lingering fetch rise beneath the boat, then fall away. The wind plays in their hair. Flo’s is tied back but Lucy’s whips out like a flag behind her and Harry tastes a hint of lavender on the air. He catches himself searching the wind for it and realises that he’s actually trying to taste Lucy. Or at least, he hopes it’s Lucy he’s trying to taste, hopes that his mother hasn’t recently switched to a lavender-scented shampoo.

The motor drones. The smell of two-stroke hangs above the long, aerated triangle of their wake.

The boat sends arc after arc of rippling wavelets at the rocks as he guides it towards the shore of the island. Plumes of crayweed finger the surface of the water and link up to form a maze of glassy atolls.

Perfect.

Lucy and Flo sit in silence as Harry puts the motor into neutral, lifts the craypot and heaves it over the side of the boat, feeding the rope through his enormous fingers until it hits the bottom. He ties off the slack rope and tosses the buoy in. It bobs on the surface, his licence number written painstakingly neat in black texta, plain to see.

He eases the boat back out from the weed forest and into deeper water, then motors slowly until he finds a patch of bottom that’s black with weed, but dotted with windows of clear water that tinge the white sand deep beneath a pale turquoise blue—magpie bottom—then lets the motor idle again as he turns to Lucy.