Soon by Charlotte Grimshaw

doesn’t annoy David. He tends to be quite, you know, left wing.’
    â€˜Don’t worry about that. Now Johnnie, we’ll go and find Elke. She and Ray and Shaun are going to take you for an ice cream. Would that be nice?’
    Johnnie brightened. ‘I saw Ray’s gun.’
    â€˜His gun? He didn’t show it to you?’
    â€˜Yeah.’
    â€˜Oh. He shouldn’t do that, should he, Simon?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Simon said, lazily watching the waves breaking into lines of pure white foam. ‘What’s the etiquette with guns?’
    â€˜Well, you’re not supposed to wave them about. You’re not supposed to brandish them. At the children . Um, would you mind taking this? And this? And this? ’ She loaded Garth with towels, togs and a bucket and spade. ‘Bye Simon. See you for lunch.’
    â€˜He lifted up his shirt,’ Johnnie said.
    â€˜What about his trouser leg?’ Roza said. ‘I’ve always imagined he’d have a gun strapped to his leg, just above his boot. Shall we ask him? Are you all right, Garth? Could you just take this little one as well? And if I just pop that on the top . . .’
    They went off across the dunes, Roza and Johnnie hand in hand and Garth balancing his teetering load, following a short distance behind. She would be making Soon talk.
    Simon spotted Sharon and the Cock down at the water’s edge, carrying swimming gear and a beach umbrella. He lay low in the dunes, watching through the marram grass as they passed by. A minute later a couple of David’s bodyguards ambled past.
    There was no shade. The sun was directly overhead and the hollow in the dunes grew hotter until he started to feel light-headed. He dumped his bag down on the shore and waded in, swam out beyond the waves, floating over the swells and watching the gannets diving. Sharon and the Cock were two wavering shapes in the distance; they’d gone all the way to the estuary. He swam further out, until the gannets flying overhead made him nervous and he turned back, imagining a missile of beak and talons plunging towards his scalp. When he reached the shallows he found the water had swept him some way south and he had to walk back for his bag.
    He crossed the lawns. Voices drifted from the pool. Marcus and the Gibson boy had managed to import a trio of girls into the compound, and were engaged in strenuous and loud attempts to impress; there was much splashing and shouting, shrieks from the girls. The Little House was empty. He stood in the warm, sunlit room, listening to the creak of the wooden walls and birds squabbling over the roof tiles. The light was green, shining in through the grapevine that grew across the veranda trellis. In the bedroom he took the DVD of Weeks’s films out of its hiding place and put it in the machine.
    The first film opened with a rural scene, in summer. A man and woman were living in a small wooden house by a beach. They were poor, their lives were basic and their relationship was troubled. Simon watched, bored. He wanted to find something significant, a clue to Weeks.
    He paused the DVD and sat dreaming in the warmth. Beyond the open door the tuis squabbled in the bushes and rosellas flew between the trees, bright flashes of colour. He thought about his daughters: conscientious Claire, alone at home with her books, and Elke, who had, that morning, signed up for tennis lessons with Garth. Simon was now grateful for Garth’s campness; it was a relief, what with all the male virility hereabouts. Elke wandered though the compound in her minuscule, loose bikini, her shirt slipping off one brown shoulder, and with her sweet manner and her vague, distracted air she seemed unaware of the eyes that followed her. Could she really be so artless?
    Simon had watched the Cock ogling her by the pool, and David watching the Cock, and the Cock noticing David watching — and that minor tension seemed part of