She walked to the sink and filled a glass with water from the tap. The light on her helmet made the dark room throb like an emergency.

‘We were just talking about the seventies,’ Astra said. ‘And Mike,’ she added, as if the name itself was a kind of provocation.

‘Uh huh,’ said Tess, drinking. She put the glass on the edge of the bench. ‘Mike who?’

‘Mike what’s-his-face,’ said Astra, coming back to the table and slumping down with one leg crossed beneath her. It was a forced display of nonchalance. If saying Mike’s name had been a challenge, she seemed to have backed down already. She closed the diary on the table and picked up her phone instead. ‘Mike you-know,’ she said, flicking at the screen.

‘Mike Tadic?’

‘Yeah.’

‘With the screwdriver?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Did you know Mike?’ I asked Tess. ‘What’s this about a screwdriver?’

‘Old friend of Astra’s,’ Tess said, removing her helmet finally and switching off the light. ‘Tried to kill himself by running into a tree with a screwdriver pointed at his heart. That’s right, isn’t it?’

Astra nodded without looking up.

‘Then he tried to set himself on fire,’ Tess said. “Have you eaten?’

We hadn’t. Astra had forgotten all about dinner.

‘Shit,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry,’ though she remained where she was, slumped across the table now, like a teenager in mock exhaustion. I waited for Tess to say something else about Mike, or dinner. Instead, she turned and disappeared down the hallway. Astra smiled, but in her eyes, something seemed to have burnt out.

I had a dream that night, a variation on a recurring theme, in which I cornered a dying man. Do you remember my father? I asked him, and in my hand I had a hammer with which I bludgeoned his head. I woke and lay in darkness, sensing the presence of other dreams slipping away behind this one. It was three-thirty in the morning. Someone was snoring in the next room. Finally, I got up and went out quietly through the side door. Beyond the house, a grass clearing the size of two or three sports fields stretched away towards a wall of black mountain. I walked through the long grass and stood looking up. The sky was pale with galaxies. All around, the sound of crickets and frogs and whatever else was out there, living in the dirt and the trees.

‘Hi,’ said a voice.

I spun around. Astra was sitting in a chair about ten metres away, almost invisible in the dark. A match flared up.

‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean …’

‘It’s fine,’ she said, exhaling smoke towards the sky. ‘This is what I do if I can’t sleep.’ She coughed. ‘We need to cut this grass.’

We were quiet for a while.

‘It’s my birthday today,’ she said at last.

‘Happy birthday,’ I said.