It was Sally, wife number one, Charlie said, who first heard about Emerald City. This would have been the end of 1975, the start of 1976. Charlie was drinking a lot and painting big abstract expressionist paintings, and meanwhile his marriage was dying. That’s when Sally came home with the idea, Charlie said. Something had to change. Also, Sally was pregnant. They needed a fresh start.

‘We thought maybe we should drink goat’s milk and eat yucky food every day and be free from the structures of society.’

So they packed the car, and sold everything that didn’t fit.

When they first arrived, it was barely a dozen people. Gradually, others began to arrive — friends of friends, families, actors, musicians, professors of sociology, then just some pretty shifty types of people, criminals basically, Charlie said. There was a brief reference that corroborated this description in Bob Mollard’s Utopian Dreaming, an old sun-damaged green pamphlet, which Charlie pulled down from the bookshelf for me. Then the whole place fell apart in the early eighties, and was bulldozed by the locals.

While it worked — and, in a kind of way, it seemed to, for a few years — people worked together with their hands, with axes and chainsaws, with paintbrushes and hammers and needles and thread. Neve was born. Sally yarned, and set up an ill-fated garment-making cooperative, Charlie told me, while he scrounged for materials and stole things. He tore apart old cars and washing machines and put them back together again as geodesic domes.

‘Vincent came and helped with some of that stuff,’ Charlie said, and he claimed to have a photo of my father standing on the roof of one of those domes. He’d try and dig it out for me, he promised. ‘Those fucking domes always leaked, though,’ he laughed, and in the end, they gave up on the domes.

It was raining the last time my father went up to Emerald City. Charlie remembered this, he said, because Vincent had just got back from somewhere or other and it was nice to see him. Also, Charlie had just blown a hole in his own roof with a rifle. This was the story I remembered. The rifle had been a birthday gift, a few years earlier. A Lee-Enfield .303. My father had given it to him.

It must have been in 1977, Charlie said, because Elvis was dead and ‘someone had been playing “Burning Love” on repeat for three fucking days’, during which time it hadn’t stopped raining. The rifle, which Charlie had been using to shoot kangaroos, had just gone off. Who knows how? Charlie was too drunk to understand. The bullet had passed through the narrow gap between Sally and their two-year-old daughter, Neve, and blown a hole in the roof. Now the roof was leaking again.

When he arrived, later that afternoon, my father must have thought: Fantastic, here’s something for me to fix.

Sally, I guessed, thought something different.