Tara remembered almost nothing about Charlie, she said, and nothing at all about Emerald City. Just photos, and Charlie’s accent, and going to his house once, or what she supposed was his house, in the mountains somewhere, or the hills.

‘That was a weird day,’ she said.

‘When did this happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘but I remember turning up and there was a forest with, I don’t know, like old bits of rides, from a fairground or something, scattered in the trees. It was like another planet.’

‘Wait, was I there?’

‘Yeah, you were there. I think you were there.’

‘I don’t think I was there,’ I said.

‘Wait, was I there?’ she laughed.

‘And what happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember, but it was like alchemy, and Nietzsche and the reformation.’ She couldn’t stop laughing. ‘I don’t know, maybe it was a dream? No, it wasn’t a dream. I don’t know. The French Revolution. That was it. Something historical like that, anyway.’

She also remembered Charlie’s formidable presence, which was what I remembered, too. He was a big, loud, articulate, intimidating Irishman, whose bald, battle-scarred head, or so it seemed to me when I was small, almost touched the ceiling in our back room in Byron Street. In my memory, Charlie had to stoop simply to stand there, but this was a falsification of mine, I realised, since it was Charlie, together with my father, who actually built that room, in the mid-seventies. Beginning at about eight in the morning, when Charlie arrived, this building process had involved an enormous amount of cask wine, which he and my father continued to drink from Vegemite jars until well into the evening, by which point, of course, they would have been too drunk to build anything.

But even these details were not something I knew before I arrived. I knew only that Charlie was my father’s friend, that he had been an alcoholic, a history teacher, and a member, for a few years, of a radical commune called ‘Emerald City’ in far northern New South Wales. Also, that he had a daughter called Neve, who was a few years older than me, and with who I rode the ghost train at Luna Park one afternoon when we were children. Beside her I became very brave, and together we made that trip thirteen times in a row, which was a record, I believe.