Low-tide beaches covered in sea grass, and a couple of kids with buckets and spades. Pop said, ‘That’s where we shoulda taken you, Clem.’ Regretfully, like there was a whole life he should’ve lived, and shared, and shown, but hadn’t, because he’d listened to other people.

‘Not much of a beach,’ I said.

And near this beach, a little town with a jetty that kept going out for miles, trying to reclaim the sea, because the ocean (I guessed) kept receding. Maybe this is what Pop was seeing. A jetty that’d had bits tacked on over the years. But in the end, the sea would be too far way, and you’d have to stop building, and then you weren’t a seaside town, but a swampy town, and who wanted to live there?

We arrived at Port Wakefield. The highway had bypassed the town centre and now there was a row of servos and bakeries and public toilets, all smelling swampy. We stopped at the BP and Pop filled up, parked the car and led us towards promised pies. Bursting with molten meat. Splitting open, burning our hands as we sat under a lean-to with a few hundred seagulls. As they got closer, Ernie kicked at them, and they scattered, but returned.

‘They’re fearless,’ I said, throwing a bit of burnt crust.

‘Don’t feed them,’ Pop said. ‘Never get rid of them.’

We ate in silence. The conversation, too, surged and receded. Someone would start something and Pop’d say it’s bullshit and Ernie would disagree and Peter would try to find a middle path, and I’d just sit and listen, and giggle inwardly.

‘She woulda read it by now,’ Peter said.

‘Wonder what they’re doing?’ I added.

‘They’re all gonna die,’ Pop said.

The park was dead grass and blue metal, and the lean-to produced a pocket of shade the size of a large grave. We kept moving to avoid the sun. Someone had scribbled vaginer on the table, and someone else had drizzled sauce over the slats. The wind blew up around us. I said, ‘Why would anyone live here?’

‘People need petrol,’ Pop said.

‘But who’d need a job this bad?’

Peter stretched back, breathed the exhaust from the highway and said, ‘I could think of worse places.’

In a way, this was the number 33 of Highway 1. Livable, just, full of its own feral cats, and lives. Treeless, loveless, hopeless.

‘If you’re born somewhere,’ Pop said, ‘and it’s all you know.’

The seagulls were losing interest. They guessed we were a lost cause. Mincemeat had spilled onto the ground, but Pop wasn’t letting them near.

‘Butcher bird,’ Ernie said.

There, in the middle of the gulls, waiting for a scrap.

‘Na, that’s a swift,’ Peter said.

‘Bullshit, a butcher bird,’ Ernie said. ‘You can tell from the beak, and the big eyes.’