I was going to say no, but something in his demeanour stopped me. He stood, arms dangling lax, bare-footed, surefooted, toes splayed easily in the jetty grime. The casualness of his stance seemed to say: Hey, I’m just offering but I couldn’t give a rat’s either way, it’s up to you, and I found this lack of urgency reassuring, non-threatening. His unkempt jaw reminded me of a lichen-covered boulder. Lazy stubble, not fashionable stubble, I suspected, given the state of his clothing: eighties-era Stubbies too short to be trendy at the time, a tatty T-shirt that boasted Port Macquarie, a homespun jumper knotted sloppily around his waist. Not the same jumper that I was wearing the evening of the argument, but the same vintage—output of a grandmother, industrious on her deathbed two years earlier. Premature wrinkles worked to emphasise the almond shape of his eyes, which were green and gold and shining mischievously, I immediately imagined, although perhaps it was just refracted sunlight. Regardless, I began to feel mischievous, reckless too, and quickly found myself thinking: What the heck? Why not? How else are you going to make any friends down here?

‘How do you know there were dolphins out here?’ I asked as we sliced our way around the jagged headland and out into the Tasman Sea.

‘I was doing a bit of work out here earlier,’ he told me. ‘For Dad. He had to go up to town this evening so we got back in early and I was mooching about, doing nothing, and I thought: It’s so beautiful. I mean, this weather! When does this ever happen? This still and hot?’

‘It’s pretty un-Tassie-like, hey?’ I murmured in agreement, and then was racked with anxiety, hoping he wouldn’t catch me out as a mainlander. I really had no idea if it was un-Tassie-like; I’d only been down here a few months, and even though I’d never had weather like this yet, it wasn’t to say it didn’t happen.

‘Blood oath,’ he said, to my relief. ‘And see those clouds? We might even get a proper summer storm and everything.’

I looked to the west, to where he was pointing, and saw how the silvery sheet collided into white billows mushrooming with black underbellies. There was so much latent energy in that sky.

‘What sort of work were you doing?’ I asked.

‘Ab diving. I do a bit for the old man here and there.’

‘Does your dad own a licence?’ I asked, impressed. I’d heard abalone licences described as golden tickets: the sort of thing every Tasmanian—no matter what their profession—wished they’d invested in back in the eighties when they were cheap as chips, before the industry became heavily regulated and licence numbers were capped in a bureaucratic move that made the existing tickets all the more lucrative.