We fire up the truck to bury Matty. Christine and Kat in the cabin and me, Tug, Mop, Saccharine, Bruce and Special K, hanging off the back. Matty’s old heeler, Brew, stands on her back legs, looking over the cabin at the cane speeding by. Saccharine Tendulkar and me toss a coin to see who’ll take his dog. I win. We come to the t-section, turn right and go past the Moo Pub as one of the curb drinkers raises his beer and crosses himself.

Matty was a ten year resident at the Tranquility Caravan Park with a 22 foot Jayco, big awning, BBQ and a fire pit. People liked him. Shared his fish caught off the beach and liked a drink. Probably too much. Liver. I remember his first day. Freshly divorced at 60 and flashing the cash. He got rolled in the Moo and Christine, the caravan park owner, looked after him. She looks after all of us. She has put $500 on the front bar for the wake. We’re heading up the hill. Heavy rainforest on each side. The whip birds are in full song. The afternoon sun flashes through the foliage as Christine puts her foot down, which is good because there ain’t much room back here with the coffin. Matty was a 16-stone pie ‘n’ chips man.

We’re dropping him in a hole on the side of a hill which overlooks the coast. There’s a beautiful passionfruit orchard behind him. You can see the weather out to sea an hour before it lands. He used to sit up there thinking about his dead wife and the ripeness and sharpness of it all. I never asked him how he ended up at Tranquility. A man has to volunteer that. No permanent resident stands on the moral high ground.

Tug and Mop do chores for Bruce around the park as they’ve only got the dole. No super. No pension. They’re permanents and good with machinery. Bruce is a former truckie with hands the size of baseball gloves. Christine’s offsider. He spends the night in the Big House with her behind the office. She’s 62 and Bruce is 54. You ‘cradle snatcher’ we say when she has a a drink with us. Not so often now.

The truck is flying up Frog Lane. Plenty of corrugations. Plenty of avocados and acacia trees too. We duck the overhead branches as the truck pulls in to a siding. Christine yanks the hand break. We carry the cheap coffin 100 metres up over a small ridge. Tug’s wife Kat grabs the two shovels and Special K carries the rope. He’s got Downs Syndrome. We used to call him Mongy. His real name’s Keith but now he’s Special K. Christine bought little cushions for our shoulders. Women think of these things. Tug and Mop do the heavy lifting at the back but me and Bruce say bullshit. This bastard is heavy all over. We take three breaks before reaching the hole.

I want to say something looking down at the coffin. I see Matty in my caravan filleting the whiting and singing ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ and I’m on the sofa with the curtains drawn and it’s a still summer night but nothing will come. Tug, Mop and Bruce take turns shovelling the dirt in. Christine says God bless you Matty as we gaggle our way down the hill. Brew doesn’t want to leave so we haul her with us with heaps of come on Brew, come on old mate.

The beers are lined up on the bar but the locals don’t drink ‘em until Christine takes the first sip. Then it’s on. Bruce lays down another $500 and someone yells Here’s to Matty and there’s more Here’s to Matty and I’m standing in the corner singing Some enchanted evening, when you find your true love, with a jug of Jack Daniels and Coke and I wake up on the ground outside past midnight with pissed pants and Brew whining next to me. My problem’s the glug glug. That’s why I live alone in a caravan with 67 years under my belt. Wife gone and too old to work. I’m a permanent but thinking of Matty, none of us are.

I wake up in bed. Brew’s cold, wet nose nuzzles me. She’s hungry. I scrape bake beans, toast and egg on to a plate. Christine’s talking low and slow outside. She’s angry. A man in his 40s with a red baseball cap is leaning out of a new Range Rover telling her the caravan park is shit and the shower block is a disgrace. Says there’s derros walking around and the kids down the end of the park kept him up all night with their music. He’s towing a new 17-foot off-road expander. No change out of $100,000. She’s telling him the beach is 70 metres away, there’s wildlife from arsehole to breakfast and it’s a beautiful day. If all you’re gunna do is bitch, why don’t you fuck off. He puts his foot down as his wife gives Christine the finger, which is reciprocated. I’ll look at the Trip Advisor review later.

The top dogs and grey nomads from Sydney and Melbourne, with their satellite TVs and hot and cold running hand jobs, pay $60.00 a night for a powered site. We rolled up a year after Christine’s husband croaked in 2007. The GFC hit and Tranquility was deserted. We had nowhere else to go. She knew that. As permanents, we only pay $100 a week with power and if I’m honest, our sites aren’t Home and Garden. I used to be an accountant back in the world. I know what she makes a year. Guest numbers are comatose and depreciation and maintenance are bleeding cash. We’re a negative in real estate marketing terms.

There’s 20 young people living near the dam on the north side of the park. They keep to themselves. A tent city with solar panels. Sometimes they wander through our area with their dogs and we say hi and they say hi and they ask to borrow something and it’s not a problem as long as they give it back. The girls are friendly and want to know our story but we just smile. Saccharine told his story once so they cooked him a dope cake and left a stolen surfboard outside his caravan. One of the older girls said she’d let him, you know, because in profile he looked like Lord Krishna. The last time Saccharine had a hard-on, the Twin Towers were standing.

Every morning, rain, wind or hangover, I walk from the caravan park down the five kilometre smile of Tranquility Beach. I read the tracks: wren’s feet, geckos, blue tongues and sometimes red belly black snakes. This morning Brew walks beside me with a stick in her mouth. She’s lost her master and is unsure of herself. The wind is from the south east. Might rain this afternoon. The park becomes a quagmire if it pisses down. No drainage. Tranquility is 40 acres of trees and scrub fronting the beach. Big wigs in Sydney and Brisbane tried for 30 years to get Christine and her Dad before her, to sell. Offered big money. A year after I moved in, a Gold Coast property developer bought 100 acres of scrub next to the park, surveyed it and was going to build 100 Club Med-style apartments. The faecal matter hit the fan as Christine and the locals hit them with environmental claims, Aboriginal heritage, the works, but nothing worked. One night I went to the site, took a soil sample and sent it to a Melbourne laboratory. Mega-high levels of acid sulphate. Dig it up and you’ve got sulphuric acid. Horror movie stuff with rich kids dissolving before your eyes. The state government put the kibosh on it and bought the land. I got free rent for a year and started buying from the top shelf.

Brew plonks herself on top of a sand dune, her tongue lolling out. Old dog wants a rest. I sit beside her and scratch her jib ears then follow her back to the park but she makes her way to Matty’s van. Come on old mate, I say, you’re living with me now. Chops and sausages tonight.

The Trip Adviser and Google reviews are bad:

“This place has potential but it needs new owners. The woman who runs the place is bloody rude. She showed us our site and it was mud with trees hanging over the top. I’ve got a new van. When we complained she said, “God helps those who help themselves.” We stayed one night and the barking dogs and derros laughing around a fire kept us awake. We won’t be back. Shit hole.”

“It’s right on the beach and that’s the best bit. Tinea-infested shower blocks and a sewerage system which barely works. My teenage daughter was offered drugs by a woman who looked like Bob Marley in drag. A haven for drop outs and alkies. Bulldoze it and start again.”

I spend the day cleaning the van. At 5.00 pm I knock and walk in to the Big House. Christine and Bruce are sitting around the kitchen table with the accounts spread over the table. Looks like someone died again. They’re $75,000 in the red. Income declined seven per cent year on year for the last five years. The posh vans are bypassing Tranquility and going to the Big 4 down the road.

Bruce puts the kettle on. “If we have another Christmas like that, we’re fucked.”

Christine doesn’t need to say it. Sometimes you just know. Like Act IV in a Shakespeare tragedy with dead bodies all over the place. Her long fingers knit and unknit in front of her as the afternoon sun falls on an embroidered wall hanging her Mum made, “Hearth and Heart.” Bruce puts his hands on her shoulders. I make my way to Mop and Kat. They know the score. Shit. We all know the score. There are 30 of us old bastards. 20 vans. Time to do the right thing and go. Maybe they could turn it around with us gone. Who’s going to look after Special K? Saccharine gets on with him best. Where are me and Brew going to stay? Most places don’t allow permanents let alone dogs.

Tug, Mop and Saccharine are going to hit the rum and stagger down memory lane. Play old pop songs badly on Tug’s five string guitar. I’ll catch them later. Night falls as I sit on a sand dune in the scrub I saved yonks ago. Brew’s at my feet, her black button nose twitching. I light a small fire to cheer us up. On the headland to the south, the lighthouse sweeps the ocean and sky. A full moon rises in the east just below Venus. The lap and murmur of high tide and the scent of rotting seaweed are a comfort. The flashing dot of a plane carrying people from one city to another, passes high overhead. They’re sitting in rows with their little tables full of single serving dinners and tiny bottles of wine.

A tiny electric blue butterfly lands on Brew’s head. She’s too old to notice. I look up and there are hundreds of them whirling in a gyre above the fire. One lands on my hand. It’s no bigger than a thumb nail with a tiny diamond pattern on each wing. Nature has put on a show for our last night at Tranquility. Christine knows about bugs. Before she took over the caravan park, she was a botanist in South America. I gently pick the little beauty up by its wings and we make our way to the Big House. Bruce and Christine are half way through a second bottle of red.

“You ever seen one of these?” I say to Christine.

She takes the butterfly and turns on the overhead light.

“Just a minute”

She pulls a big book out of the bookcase and with one hand holding the butterfly, flicks the pages. Bruce walks outside for a piss. Her face is a study in concentration.

“Jesus” she says. “It’s a bloody Blue Angel. You’ve found a Blue Angel.” She puts the book down and gets a magnifying glass from her desk and stares at the butterfly, her lower jaw dropping.

Bruce returns with Brew, who’s found an old bone. She plonks herself down and starts chewing.

“Bruce, Bruce, do you know what this is?” she says pointing at the butterfly. “It’s one of the rarest butterflies in the world. Thought to be extinct. The last colony was bulldozed for a suburb in Argentina 40 years ago”

Bruce is underwhelmed. “Can it lend us $100K with no security?”

Christine’s shaking her head and smiling like a lunatic. “Show me where you found this little guy”

We walk over to the sand dune and the fire is burning low. Christine stands hands on hips. Above the flame, tiny blue dots whirl counter clockwise 30 metres in to the air. I stand back and in the distance, Tug’s butchering Dylan’s ‘Lay Lady Lay’ on guitar. Christine’s crying.

“You’ve got no idea what this means,” she says.

Bruce and me look at each other and shrug.

“Don’t you get it?” she says. “Don’t you get it?”

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The Washington Post did a photo-story with me, Christine and Bruce. Social media picked it up and people started arriving at Tranquility from all over the world. The Department of Environment fenced off the area and built an office with two night time tours. A couple of the kids got jobs.

Saccharine joins me for the early morning walk. His diabetes is worse. Brew sniffs the flotsam and jetsam and hunts for the right stick to carry. I’m walking and talking. There’s no reason to life. There’s a dynamic we don’t understand. Something flexing and pulsating beyond atoms and the stars. That’s pretty deep for an alco-numbers man, Saccharine says as Brew digs in the sand, her bum wagging a tail salute to the rising sun.