I imagined him telling stories about his adventures in India. I imagined him spreading his arms wide. But what were his adventures? He never mentioned them to me. I can almost see his mouth moving, but I can’t hear anything.

Charlie didn’t remember what his adventures were either. ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘He kept all that stuff to himself.’

But later that night, while Charlie slept in the back of his car, Vincent and the American climbed down into the well to retrieve the rifle. If Charlie didn’t want it, then Vincent would take it back. They stashed it under a blanket in the boot of the Monaro. That gun had once belonged to my grandfather. I knew this, because my father had told me that part of the story. Before he died, my father gave the gun to me.

The day after all this happened at Emerald City, Charlie said, Sally left for good. She took Neve to Sydney, where she stayed with her sister and eventually got a job as a librarian. Charlie stayed on in Emerald City for a while. Then he burnt all his paintings and left, he told me. He travelled around. He worked as a ditch digger and as a cook in the Adelaide Hills. He built fences. He was a courier. Then, in March 1978, he got a job driving a small truck, which he rolled, drunk, on the border of South Australia and Victoria, and managed to crawl out of alive. My father drove up and collected him from the hospital, and Charlie came down and slept on our couch in Byron Street for a few weeks. I’d seen photos of that, his neck in a brace. His broken leg. I was three months old at the time. Charlie held me in his arms and rocked me back and forth. Then he joined AA. Then he went back to university and studied to become a school teacher. He taught history and politics for many years, though what he really wanted was to teach philosophy. He seemed to recognise in Nietzsche’s portrayal of Zarathustra an image of himself: a hermit breaking reluctantly from the tranquillity of the mountain cave in order to enlighten — and inevitably fail to enlighten — a herd of idiots.

‘My relationship with your father never changed,’ he told me. ‘We didn’t have a lot of contact, but it didn’t matter. We never went our separate ways. It was a true friendship. I’d never had one of those before. I still hear the sound of his car coming round the corner sometimes.’

Charlie’s voice had died down to a whisper by this point, a thin, whistly thread that finally trailed off altogether. His eyes were closed. It was late afternoon. Lucy was home now. We could hear her bustling around in the other room. My train to Brisbane would leave in a few hours. My family was waiting for me. My wife and child.