We saw the last of them off at around ten, several of Ish’s friends insisting on staying a little longer than the others to help clear up the debris. LC was still bouncing. Our video guests, with lives of their own, had logged off, but I was guessing that Ish and Clara would be having a far more private conversation a little later. LC had run out of steam an hour earlier, but had insisted on staying up with ‘new friends’ despite the fact that she was falling asleep. It was Maz who carried her to her bed, while I hung around to shoulder the burden of making gentle fun of my son.

I had watched him as the evening unfolded, and the way his mood and expression had altered was enlightening. With his friends, clearly not a group of classmates that might have included some of those happy to repeat Vietnam-era slurs, he was self-assured, if a little reticent when they praised him for that footy thing. When the two girls had shared pictures of their homeland, he had been smug beyond belief: “Been there, climbed that, got several T-shirts worth of memories’.

Once Clara had appeared, though, there had been such a mixture of reactions from our boy. While he had been all too evidently delighted to see her, I could almost read his mind.

‘What will they think? Will I seem soppy/desperate/tasteless/ weird?’, followed by a slowly building pride.

My girl.

As I lay with my own girl, or at least the older one, I ran that past her, and she hugged me tighter.

“We talked about that while you were bagging the debris, love. He’d been worried that they’d, you know, read her. Don’t think they did. She’s… She’s very natural in who she is, darling”

I grunted something anodyne, and Maz sat up a little so that she could look me in the eyes, despite the gloom of the night.

“No. It’s important, that. To walk out with someone… That Marty, ey? His wife is, well, he must have got a lot of abuse over her”

“Well, some of the abusers ended up nicked, according to our coppers”

“True, but it doesn’t take away the pain that they can cause. Marty, he’s got real courage. Our boy… I do think he’s the same, but I can’t help wondering. Did you see the way his mates reacted to Enfya and Alys?”

“In what way?”

“Oh, darling, sometimes… It was sort of ‘couple of girls… oh, they’re married, to each other. Got another lamb chop ready?’. They didn’t care. I just don’t know how far that extends; as far as the thing Clara has to deal with? I don’t know. It just seemed a little off to me that our boy gets jibes about being gay, but they don’t give a whatever about a married lesbian couple””

“I suspect there’s always a much nastier attitude to men being gay than women. Anyway, that thing is something that Ish has to deal with as well, love”

“That’s a thing all of us have to deal with, husband of mine. I just hope this evening has helped as much as I was praying”

“You? Praying?”

Her grip tightened for an instant, before she muttered, “Figure of fucking speech”, and then wriggled back down into a more relaxed cuddle.

“Sleep now, Mike. We have work on Monday, and our little girl has made a request. She wants to go water sliding before she goes back to school. Apparently, some of her new classmates will be there, and she asked if she could take Ish’s boogie board”

“Um, not another barbie?”

“I don’t believe so. I think their aims are more ice cream than burnt snags”

“Remind me of what we have for Monday, love”

“You have five, count them, five new eateries in Rockingham. I’m doing the rounds of Allendale, then a couple of places on William Street. Tuesday to Thursday is with the State people again, and Ronnie’s found us a pizzeria for Friday morning, working together. Busy week”

“Then the beach sounds like a plan for tomorrow. Quiet night in tomorrow?”

“I think so. Now time for a quiet night here and now…”

She was away to her dreams so quickly I didn’t have the chance to say goodnight properly, and then, without my noticing any interval, it was morning. Ish was late up, probably as a result of long online chats, and I considered locking up his laptop overnight before the facts bit me sharply on the backside. I’d managed a late night conversation with my own lover, of course, but she was there, in the house, in my bed, and probably wondering where her morning cup of tea was, while his was rather further away. Time to adjust, Rhodes.

“Plans for today, son?”

He yawned hugely.

“Not really, Dad”

“Well, your sister has. Her own classmates are having a beach day, without, before you ask, a barbie”

“Oh?”

“Ice creams and probably sandcastles. And water sliding”

“Eh?”

“Boogie board, son. I think she needs her own”

“She can use mine”

“You don’t want to do it side by side, son?”

He twitched a little, before grinning, and I realised that my thoughts of him as a grown man weren’t quite on the mark, for there still remained enough of our baby boy to keep me smiling. As Maz said so often, he would always be her baby, no matter how big he grew, and it was nice to be reminded of that.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Just a thought… but is there any way we could make a dry suit for the bear?”

Now there was an inspired idea.

We duly packed a couple of eskie bags with cold drinks and sandwiches, Kawan being detailed with houseguarding duties, and walked the short distance to ‘our’ café, where we were greeted with genuine warmth as we ordered a cuppa and its friends.

“How’s the little one getting on with the water, Mike?”

“Loving it, Louisa! Just glad we’re here, not down by Maggie River, or she’d probably be on the rocks half the time”

“Eh?”

“Got another climber here, love. At least we can keep her mind on one thing at a time. Kids’ seaside day today, with her schoolfriends”

The woman winced.

“I’ll get the ear plugs ready, then. I’ll be the one going ‘Ey? Ey? Ey?’ like a bloody Sydneysider. Oh: no shark activity reports right now, Mike”

“Nice one, Lou. Oh, from me: what time are you open till, today?”

“Ah, see what the trade’s like, mate. If there’s still a good crowd, I’ve got a load of seafood in, do some of that”

I looked over to my family, sitting under a parasol on the terrace.

“Maz? Kids?”

I got a mingled grunt back from them. So articulate.

“Louisa is asking if we want to eat here early evening. Fresh seafood in; needs to know if it needs freezing, or if we’re going to dispose of some of it”

Their reaction was a lot clearer, so that was our Perth Sunday. Our girl ran around screaming with her friends, Ish did various energetic activities, including ‘surfing’ next to his sister as she used the board we had picked up from the shop by the café, Maz slathered sunblock on the two of them every five minutes, and when she wasn’t doing that, the two of us sawm slowly around twenty or so yards offshore, breathing through our snorkels as we looked for Nice Things.

A typical family Sunday in Perth indeed, but one thing pleased me above all else, and that was the behaviour of our smaller child. When we had first brought her out of hell, she had been almost silent, unwilling to risk the consequences of speaking out of turn, or, perhaps, of speaking at all. It had taken so long to accustom her to having her own space, and a choice of when she could enter it, and her first moments of self-declaration…

It had broken my heart when she hadn’t just asked if she could play with the dogs at Steph’s place, but whether she was allowed to ask for permission in the first place. That moment at Burbage North, “DO IT AGAIN!”, had been the start of of what seemed like a bud, slowly opening, and right then, I really, really didn’t want to know any more about ‘the rattan’ or ‘the man with the axe’, for she was simply another little girl, among other children of her age, running and screaming enough to confuse the silver gulls and make me consider Lou’s solution.

Ish flopped down on the sand next to Maz and myself, breathing hard, and helped himself to a cold drink after checking if we elder things wanted one. He took a long swig, staring down the beach as his sister and her crew started to build a sea fort under the guidance of a friend’s father.

“Dad? Mum?”

“Son?”

“She’s happy, isn’t she?”

“I do believe so, son. Gives us all a job, doesn’t it?”

He looked around, still on that cusp between our boy and his own man, and Maz took his hand.

“She is, darling. We just need to make sure it stays that way”

Ish nodded, and my own thoughts were clear: how do we keep our son happy as well?