Weightlessly bobbing, I picture my body from above—bitten and bleeding—crimson moving like smoke tails from my sagging Billabong one-piece. What would they say about me once I was gone?

‘Swimming alone on an overcast night at 7 pm? That’s shark weather.’

The sky fades like a dimmer switch and my nervous instincts rise. I flip and paddle urgently towards the shore, unharmed.

I live in a very beautiful place at the very edge of the world. Perth, Western Australia, where the water is blue and the future’s always bright because no one remembers the past. Four hours flight from the hubs of the east, we’re forgotten and rarely visited. The days are luminous. The hot air smells like jacaranda and feels like the inside of a car left too long in the sun. It is a long way from the bleak and difficult and a long way from the past.

Somewhere in Cottesloe, there’s a vast, green golf course with nobody in it. Nearby, three men lift their beer and sip, arms crossed, knees wide, facing forward and looking outward but never at one another. The conversation halts. They scroll on their phone. A young waitress in a white linen shirt asks them if they would like anything else. A chin wags, a menu shuffled, she thanks them and walks away.

A phone call is made, an email sent. Like a tiny match dropped into crisp grass, buzzing phones begin to flinch against the table. While the news breaks, I sit on the stairs to my garden with the television turned on inside. I picture it in my mind, but I prefer not to see it, the decades that peel away from him, leaving behind something impenetrable. Bracing itself, prepared to fight whatever has been unlatched.

***

When November arrived that summer, I recall the heat like a ringing ear. I was lying on the veranda beside Harry, spreading myself across two timber deck chairs. We amused ourselves with thoughtless conversation while Jack, stoned, sat on the lawn looking at his toes.

Our house overlooked a wide, open footy oval that reminded me of my primary school and childhood Sundays. Littered with cheesy orange sprinkler stains and a crisp dryness that could shrink your gums, it felt familiar: cross-country, asthma, sausage fat, cheering parents.

To the West was Dalkeith, where great lawns perimeter the cliffs overlooking the river and fountains plash in a secluded pocket of generational wealth. Crossing sun-dappled driveways lined with impenetrable hedges, there’s an invisible presence in the air, a sinister genesis story that speaks to how harshly money is made. These fortunes are those that pooled from pits and mines and dirt yellow machines, of open cut shafts left like an inverse scab eating alone somewhere in the sands of the desert. The city built a wall around the threat it continued to feed.