I grunted. I didn’t really feel like drinking. I felt like being asleep. But I took the beer anyway, and I got up and followed him out through the dark house and into the backyard. My mother was asleep. Tara was asleep. The cats and the rabbits and the dog and the budgies were asleep. It must have been two or three in the morning, in January, because the Christmas tree was turning yellow, all the windows were open, and there were moths beating through the cobwebs to get to the light above the garage door. That’s where we sat, beneath the moths, with our backs to the garage, smoking in silence. My father smoked very strong tobacco, which, for a while, I had tried to smoke, too, but we had never smoked together like this, even though he knew that I did smoke, because I had been sent home from school for doing it. My father was not angry about that. In fact, soon afterwards, he bought me a large amount of illegally grown, untaxed tobacco, as a reward. My mother was angry about that. ‘If he’s going to smoke, he’s going to smoke,’ my father told her, and this was the tobacco I was smoking that night. It came in a large plastic bag. And maybe there was a novelty about that scenario that I should have appreciated, smoking together at last, like adults, although the truth was that my father’s presence irritated me. I suppose he was drunk, although that was not uncommon. What was worse was that he seemed to be waiting for a chance to confide in me. And then he began telling me a story about a woman he had lived with, before he’d met my mother, in this very house, he said, in the early seventies. The woman’s name was Astra.

‘Isn’t that a type of car?’ I said.

Actually, he said, sounding hurt, she was a remarkable woman. She was a tarot reader who had psychic dreams and who believed in UFOs. And one New Year’s Eve, they had walked naked together along an empty beach in a lightning storm.

Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me, I thought. I did not want to hear this story. I did not care about some old lady called Astra.

11.

11.

Now Astra was walking towards me, barefoot down the dirt driveway. She was dressed in a long black dress, and she had a shaved head, and big gold earrings that swung back and forth. We shook hands.

‘Yeah,’ she said softly, drawing out the word and nodding as she stepped back to examine me. She had a serious face, and pale grey eyes like foggy crystal balls. Then she stepped forward again and hugged me. She smelt of earth or weed or mushrooms or unpasteurised milk, something like that — a dense, living, animal smell. I could feel her bones.