Charlie thought: Fuck. Fuck.

He sat for a long time with his head in his hands, in relief, in horror, he told me. But also, in despair, because he knew that somehow, it wasn’t an accident. A part of him must have wanted to shoot his way out of there. This part of him thought: I have escaped into a trap. The wife. The kid. The nagging.

‘This wasn’t anarchism,’ he said. ‘This was domestic fucking servitude. The rain, and the wet washing, and the mud. The smell of things bloody rotting. Utopia, my arse,’ he laughed.

Some time passed. Charlie went out and threw the shotgun down a well, he said. Then he staggered back through the mud, a flagon of wine in his hand and his kaftan clinging to his body. He needed to get out of there. He’d be doing Sally a favour, although it wouldn’t be the first time he’d done her a favour by running away, he told me. At some point the remorse always kicked in, and then he had to beg her to take him back again. He knew all these things, but none of them seemed to be a very powerful thought in that moment. I’ll drive west, he remembered thinking. Or south. Not north in any case, not through Queensland, which was fascist territory in those days, under Bjelke-Petersen. He’d imagined the road unfurling in front of him, he said, and he’d started to feel pretty good. A man who drinks is interplanetary, somebody once wrote. He moves through interstellar space.

When Charlie looked up again, he saw two figures stomping towards him through the white day.

Who the fuck is this? he thought.

It was my father.

And somebody else.

‘There was some other bloke came up with your dad,’ Charlie told me.

‘Who?’

Charlie closed his eyes.

‘Handsome bloke,’ he said at last. ‘American.’

‘Abbie?’ I said.

Charlie shrugged. ‘Maybe. But they were good mates. Him and your dad. I was jealous.’

Whoever he was, this man and my father helped Charlie back to his dome, apparently. The door was locked. They banged on the metal panels. But Sally wouldn’t let them in.

‘Fuck off, you fucking fuckwits,’ she yelled.

‘Alright, fair enough, geez.’

So they’d walked up the hill, and lit a fire beside Vincent’s Monaro. The wood was wet, but they poured petrol over everything and chucked matches at it until the flames whooshed up. At some point others arrived, Charlie remembered — two girls and a bloke dressed like a clown, who was handing out bowls of mush. Then they all sat around the fire smoking joints, mesmerised by their own destinies.

‘And what was my dad doing?’ I wanted to know. ‘What was he saying?’