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caravan along, the one I’d stared at on previous occasions wondering who in this world of a sane mind would choose to live there.
    You’re in there, she said.
    The door stuck when I tried to open it. My sister rolled her eyes and got up from the step. She wrenched it open. There was a dead fly on the laminated table. It wasn’t squashed. It had died of boredom. I dumped my bag and we walked over to the showers and toilet block, then on to the kitchen. There we encountered another camper. A cheerful woman about Mum’s age who after Pen introduced me said, So you’re the proud uncle.
    No one at home had pointed this out to me—this new status I’d acquired on the back of my sister’s efforts. There was a trampoline near the office. We looked at it, and that was that. We went back to our caravans. My sister sat down in the door and reached for her magazine. After a few minutes she looked up, annoyed to see me there. You can’t just stand there doing nothing. Do something. She reached around behind her for a magazine and gave it to me to read. I took it to my caravan step and for a while read about women dieting with spectacular results—down from 350 pounds to 130 pounds in twenty-one days. The weather girl on TV was getting married. Its pages were filled with stories of broken marriages, gossip, horoscopes, all of which gripped my sister. She read avidly and in a way I never saw her read at any other time.
    I gave up and went off to explore. I followed a tall wirefence around the camp. I came upon some tents and three motorhomes. I found a creek and followed its bank. Mostly though I wondered what was going on at home. I stood at the fence separating the camp from another world where men strolled about with their golf clubs. I watched three men carrying two bags of clubs between them. They pushed one another and rolled away from friendly punches and howled with laughter at the insults flying between them. An aeroplane rose into the deep-blue yonder. A black bird swooped up and over the hurricane-wire fence. I moved along it to follow the shadows of the golfers falling across the mown grass until all I could hear was their laughter.
    Later I blamed the golfers when my sister stood angrily before me demanding to know how I hadn’t heard her calling for me. She needed milk but now I’d shown I couldn’t be trusted and so she’d have to wait until Jimmy Mack finished work. I listened to her in silence (I’d been told not to upset her given her condition) and when she finished and dropped her head back inside a magazine I sloped back to the hurricane fence with the view of the golf course. The clouds stopped as soon as I looked at them and the blue sky shot away from my eyes. A plane gently rolled over and its wing dissolved in a flash of light. I thought of the large fish I’d seen at the start of the summer. Its plump white belly. Then it had moved back into the normal shadow of a fish. And I was left hyperventilating with excitement. There was just the irregular and non-comprehending stones on the seabed to look at but my heart was still beating wildly long after the event. In the daysahead the laughter and good-natured shouts and insults of the golfers reached deep inside the camp, and each time my sister looked up from her magazines she’d ask, Now what are you smiling at?
    The grass hadn’t been cut and, after a summer that had been long and hot, I felt straw scratching and poking my jandalled feet. One stalk actually broke the skin. I could feel it. I was even aware of blood. But I did nothing about it. I didn’t stop to inspect it as I might once have but walked on with the stabbing pain and ooze of blood between my foot and the jandal. I walked on with a kind of dull fascination and insight. It was the first intimation that I wasn’t my own invention at all. Already, at a certain level, I was turning into my father. A bit of a scratch, and blood was nothing. Because I had come into pain of a different