In the car, Rob seems as snoozy as Shayne is, so they don’t talk much as they drive, or as Rob drives and Shayne sits slumped in the passenger seat like a sack of potatoes. He rests his cheek on the taut seatbelt and thinks about putting the radio on to fill the car with noise and maybe amp them up a bit. He doesn’t, though; he can’t be bothered. But when they reach that bit of the road where, as the highway rolls down the hill, the bush opens up and you get that view of the neck laid out like a bridge between the bay and the sea, the energy in the car changes instantly. The sea is stretched out silky smooth and flat and is glary with the light of the sun, which is just tipping the horizon. It’s like the glare causes the sleepiness that had been humming quietly through him, lulling him into a drowsy halfway am-I-asleep-or-am-I-awake kind of state, to speed up and become a whirr of anticipation, while Rob’s eyes, squinting into it, shed their dullness and become bright and eager. Shayne can almost taste that first beer, which, in any other context would be raspy as shit. But when you’re motoring out into first light, with a lick of salt air priming your tongue, it hits the spot like there’s no tomorrow.

They follow the highway around the curve of the bay to the boat ramp, which is nestled in its southern crook. There’s no one in sight, which isn’t necessarily that surprising given the time of year. But word is that a few blokes caught some solid bluefin out off the continental shelf last week and there’s an easterly change forecast for later on, so if you were going to go, you’d be wanting to go early. But the place is deserted.

Sometimes it’s bumper-to-bumper at the ramp, everyone bubbling with impatient anticipation, like a bunch of kids queued up for a roller coaster at a theme park. You can see the whites of the eyes and knuckles of the young blokes, who are learning to reverse trailers while their fathers coach them and the queue stacks up behind them as they butcher it, time and time again.

That’ll be Shayne and Jake, one day. He can’t tell if he’s looking forward to it, or dreading it.

Rob taught him. He’s three years older and he had his licence and was halfway through his building apprenticeship when he bought his first boat. They’d had a rowboat at the shack as kids, but this was the real deal, or so they thought at the time: a sixteen-foot tinny with a forty-horsepower outboard. Rob taught Shayne to drive a car before he was old enough to get his licence, so that he could teach him to reverse the boat, so they could get out there and whack the flatties quicker. It didn’t take long before they were bored of bottom bashing for dead-weight lizards and onto targeting bigger and better things: fighting things.