I knew about the tattoos. I didn’t know that he had been expelled at the age of fifteen for throwing a table out a window, or that he had never finished high school, or that he was once arrested for stealing a car, but never charged. Nor did I know that his parents sent him away when he was six or seven years old, to live, for a few months, with a man called Mr Sugar.

‘Who was Mr Sugar?’ I asked.

‘Vince never mentioned him?’

‘No.’

‘I think he was just a pretty unpleasant, abusive kind of person,’ Astra said. But she couldn’t tell me much more than that.

The last time she spoke to my father, she told me, was on the telephone. ‘I remember he called me from some little town,’ Astra said. ‘I suppose he was on acid, or at least he sounded like he was. And then he must have run out of coins. That would have been 1976. Just before he went overseas.’

‘To India?’

‘I think so. We lost touch.’

She also remembered that he had lots of guns.

‘What was it with all those guns?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ she said softly. ‘I couldn’t say. But I guess, if you own lots of guns, you probably feel like you need to protect yourself from something.’

We sat in silence again while Astra massaged the gold rings on her fingers. Maybe she had been beautiful once, I thought — she had certainly been young — and I tried to see it, but I saw something hard instead, like a black stone at the bottom of an ornamental pond.

While we had been sitting there, three boys had drifted through the house and disappeared around the corner of the balcony. They were shy, neat men in their late twenties, at a guess, who belonged somehow, I assumed, to Tess, because Astra ignored them. As it turned out, they were friends of Rhett, the Trump-kid I’d seen on Facebook, who was, in fact, Tess’s son, not Astra’s, and who was twenty-seven years old and still lived at home, in a bungalow around the back. Which was where he was now, Astra explained, playing a Vietnam War game called Rising Storm 2.

‘It’s very realistic,’ she said.

Now that I thought about it, I realised I could hear the faint sound of explosions and screaming, mingling with the Balinese water feature and the shrill, flicking call of an unknown bird somewhere in the palm trees. Tess was not at home at the moment, and I tried to clarify whether this meant today, or ever, but Astra stood up, stretching her bangled wrists above her head, and excused herself.