Compulsory

I'm on Jetty Road Brighton with my mum. She wants to buy me a necklace. We enter a necklace shop. After two rounds of the necklace shop we settle upon a pretty silver starfish on a delicate silver chain.

I can't have it until August.

We walk back towards the sea. We pass the cafe that sells icecream and gelati from a counter on the footpath. We decide to have one. I choose Lemon Gelati and she chooses Boysenberry Swirl. The staff are busy and don't want to catch our eye. After a minute my mum says, Let's go to the one on the corner.

We enter the one on the corner. This is more like a little seaside fish and chip shop. We wait a long time while a girl changes her order from two prawns in a paper bag to one. The icecreams are smaller here, and they don't sell gelati, or Boysenberry Swirl. I choose a Chocolate Billabong and mum gets Rum and Raisin in a cone.

We sit on a bench looking out at the jetty and the sea. There are 54 people on the jetty. The sun is low and the sea is glinting and slopping. Two small girls jump away from the waves on the last bit of sand near the steps. The waves are the colour of turkish delight. The girls have wet shoes.

I like my Billabong, but not the new stick, which is purple and made of bendy plastic. I will think twice before buying another one. Seagulls fly towards the jetty. Some of them stop for chips. We talk about politics for a while, then decide to go home.

From the esplanade, north of the jetty, we see something in the water. It's a dolphin. It is doing dolphin things, behaving like a wave. It rears up, curves and disappears. There is something hypnotic about watching a dolphin do this, or something compulsory.