‘Vincent was the only real friend I ever had,’ Charlie told me. ‘But he was a mystery to me. It was a mystery how we ever got to be friends in the first place. Then again, I’ve got such disturbing ideas about myself, I’ve never understood why anyone would want to be my friend.’

Which was why he lived out here among the rednecks, he explained, where nobody wanted anything to do with him.

‘You’re my first visitor in I don’t know how long.’

‘What about your daughter?’ I asked. ‘Does she count?’

‘Neve doesn’t come,’ he said. ‘She lives in London with her stockbroker. She goes skiing in Switzerland instead of coming to see me. But you’ve got a kid, don’t you? Your mother said something about that, I remember. A long time ago. Did it happen?’

‘It did,’ I said. ‘It happened. She’s two.’

‘Good to hear it,’ he said. ‘Just don’t expect her to come visit you in twenty-five years.’

Charlie was out on parole, he told me, when he and my father first met. This was back in the early seventies. My father was a parole officer at the time, and, on certain days, Charlie said, he would take a crew of eight or so minor criminals out into the community to mow people’s lawns, or paint church halls, or ‘weed out the blackberries in some little old lady’s overgrown back garden’. At lunchtime, according to Charlie, they’d sit around smoking cigarettes and telling lies about their hard lives. Then, most days, they would knock off early and go play pool at the pub. This was forbidden, but it was the seventies, so it didn’t seem like there was much that was strictly forbidden, and anyway, Charlie said, everyone else in the public service was drunk by lunchtime.

‘Your daddy was paid to keep an eye on me,’ Charlie said, ‘but really, it could just as easily have been the other way round.’

It was a job my father had loved, apparently, and which lasted until a new boss was appointed who’d had other ideas. There was an altercation, and my father, who had always felt persecuted, and who suffered from nightmares, drove around to his new boss’s house and unscrewed the front door.

‘So that was the end of that job,’ Charlie laughed. ‘He put the door in the back of the ute and drove away.’

‘And what about Emerald City?’ I asked. This was what I really wanted to know about. The commune.

‘Emerald City,’ Charlie said, stretching out his enormous legs and leaning back in his chair. ‘Those were the fucking days, weren’t they?’

‘Were they?’

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Fuck no. Sooner I forget all about that fucking place, the happier I’ll be.’