‘Ron,’ she said. ‘Manic,’ she said. ‘Steve,’ she said. Names I didn’t recognise, and which had something to do with a transcendental meditation group that used to meet up in the spare bedroom. Later it evolved into a pretty heavy political situation, Astra explained. Or maybe it was the other way round, the heavy politics turning inward. She couldn’t remember.

‘That big room just off the front door,’ she said. ‘Everyone was always in there humming or doing whatever.’

‘That was my sister’s bedroom.’

‘That was a lot of people’s bedroom,’ she said, turning another page. ‘But when you think about the number of people who passed through Byron Street, one way or another, you do sort of wonder how that worked. It was a pretty hectic scene.’

How did it work? I wanted to know. What did my father think about all these people coming and going? It was disconcerting to imagine him as a landlord, if that’s what he was, or as some kind of still centre, which is what he seemed to me in this account, a strangely absent figure, like a spectre that allowed these situations, these people, to simply move around him.

‘I didn’t think of him like that,’ Astra said. ‘You know, everyone really liked your dad. Is that what you want to hear?’

‘No,’ I said. I was pretty sure that wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I thought of my father, when I did think of him, in quick bursts, like fireworks: brilliant, fading, repetitive memories that were incapable of becoming anything else. I tried to explain this to her. I wanted to find out something I didn’t know.

‘I’d much rather you told me something terrible,’ I said.

‘Be careful what you wish for.’

‘Really?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Was he angry with you, or was it just with us?’ I asked.

‘That’s not my memory,’ she said, clearing her throat. ‘My overwhelming memory, actually, was just fear. For him, I mean. That he’d hurt himself.’

‘Drinking?’

‘Drinking. Driving. That’s a start.’

‘Why was he such a bad driver?’

‘I’ve got no idea. But I guess he always had a kind of death wish, didn’t he?’

‘What else do you remember?’

She shook her head. ‘Not much,’ she said. She’d met my grandparents once. She knew that my father’s relationship with them wasn’t good. He had an older brother, my uncle, who was dead now, too, and who had worked on a fishing trawler in Canada for a while. ‘Or was it an oil rig?’ she asked.

But I didn’t know.

‘His brother used to call up every Christmas Eve,’ Astra said, ‘very drunk.’

Vincent had gotten his tattoos at twelve, she told me, ‘but you probably know about that.’