Denis himself had become a half-decent amateur boxer in the early seventies, after his daughter, who was a baby at the time, died in her sleep. Boxing had seemed as good a response to this as anything else, and he was a wily, unpredictable, dirty fighter, who also had the advantage of being able to endure colossal amounts of physical punishment. According to my father, there had even been some talk of going pro, but that had been silenced for good the night he fought Alex ‘The Janitor’ Stavros. He retired as soon as he regained consciousness and was hospitalised for weeks after the fight. By this stage, his marriage had collapsed, or was on the brink of collapsing. I didn’t feel much like pressing him on the details. Most of this I had gleaned over the years without paying too much attention. The rest Denis filled in for me as I sat considering the room around us. In a different world, I imagined, the walls might have been covered with children’s drawings or family photographs.

Denis met my father in 1972, he told me, through a bloke he’d met in hospital called Barry, who knew a barmaid called Astra, who worked in a pub in St Kilda, where they all used to drink.

‘And Astra,’ Denis said, ‘was your father’s girlfriend.’

Back then Melbourne was just a weird little country town, none of this trendy stuff, Denis explained, and at night you could have fired a gun in any direction without having to worry about hitting someone. This was around the time that my dad bought the house in Byron Street, by accident, as it happened, at an auction into which he’d stumbled one afternoon, ‘half pissed and stoned and everything else’, according to Denis, after winning a significant sum of money on a horse called Transformer. This was during the period of his life when he was also claiming a disability pension from the Premier’s Department.

‘You know all this stuff, right?’ Denis asked.

‘Sort of,’ I said. Which was sort of true. I’d heard the name Astra. I’d heard about my father’s disability pension — the word malingerer stuck in my mind — but it was just a detail in a story I had never bothered to care about.

‘Vince would ring me up,’ Denis said, ‘and he’d be like “Argh, I’m going for a drink”, by which he meant he had to convince the doctor that he was a bit — you know.’ Denis’s eyes boggled.

‘Crazy?’

‘Unfit for work,’ Denis said. ‘Exactly. So he’d stay awake and drink for a few days and go to his appointment, shaking like a dog shitting razor blades, and then he’d tell the shrink, “If anyone sends me back to work they better watch their backs and their wife and their kids”, and stuff like this.’

He laughed, and his laughter became a coughing fit.