We are standing by the life-saving club, chatting about the erosion caused by the high tides. Biggest in a while. Photos in the local paper. Stories on the weekend news.
The sea has taken a tonne of its sand back and now the asphalt ramp from the clubrooms down to the beach is pretty much gone. And the sand-dune between the water and the clubrooms? Gone too. There's a drop, a cliff, a fall.
Clyde is wearing a sweater with the life-saving club logo. He knows this beach as well as anyone. Me, I'm a blow-in, a part-timer, a youngster. Clyde, he's a permanent.
He knew my parents and has outlived them by 20, and 10, years. I ask about his health and about his wife Vera. He tells me that three years ago he bent down to bowl at the bowls club and couldn't get up. 'I fell. My legs gave out from under me. I couldn't tell them what to do.'
The doctor told Clyde he had glandular fever and needed a real rest, maybe a spell in a nursing home. 'I asked, But what about Vera? Who will look after Vera?' Behind his glasses his eyes reflect the bruise of the question.
The doctor told Clyde that Vera could go into a nursing home too, one with extra facilities.
'I said, What? The two of us apart, in different nursing homes?'
The doctor said, Maybe that's what's needed.
Clyde didn't agree. Couldn't agree. Wouldn't agree. Even if his energy was ebbing away.
'I've been looking after Vera since 1996,' Clyde tells me, there outside the life-saving club and the broken ramp, where plastic orange bunting warns sightseers. 'I wasn't going to stop because of glandular fever.'
The erosion of his wife's health started before 1996 but that was the year Clyde realised he had a full-time job on his hands. A permanent job. No easy retirement here, down by the beach, down by the rise and the fall of the waves, by the drift and the pull of the tides.
The sound of the sea is constant here, rolling or crashing onto the shore, then over the diminishing dunes and into the bushland, where the houses try to — not so much hide — as hold their place.
No, no nursing homes for