She tried to smile. I saw her teeth. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I’m glad you’re out here. I didn’t get to say something.’

‘What was that?’

‘Just that I’m sorry about what happened to Vince. He was a beautiful man.’

I nodded. ‘Yeah.’

‘And I did love him,’ she said. ‘Did you know that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Then again,’ she said, ‘it’s not that simple, is it? I mean, I still love Tess, and things between us are terrible.’

‘I know about that,’ I said.

We were quiet again.

‘What happened on that freeway?’ I said at last. ‘You never finished that story.’

‘What freeway?’

‘With Dad. Doing burnouts on the Tullamarine freeway.’

‘Oh that. Yeah. We were looking for a place to shoot Mike’s film,’ Astra said. ‘I guess I loved Mike in a way, too. He was a true believer.’

‘A true believer in what?’

‘Oh, you know,’ she said, ‘the spirit of the age, I guess. All that utopian business you still see round here for instance. How we’re all gonna live in peace and sustainability ever after. We all believed it. I mean, we were really fabulous there for a while. Your dad included. But that’s not what’s going to happen, is it? We gave it a crack and now …’

‘And now?’

‘That’s what I mean. I don’t know.’

I waited for her to go on.

‘I’ve lost my attachment to pretty much everything,’ she said, making a gesture in the air with her cigarette. ‘It’s disconcerting. But on another level, I kind of like it. It’s sort of not my business anymore, you know. And now there’s this other thing, which is happening. Rhett’s mates back there. And they are different. I mean, they are sorting through the available data in a really different way. For them, it’s all about Mars and Elon Musk and the internet. It’s all about this whole post-human thing. They want to build robots to fight wars and replace women.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s the future.’

‘You think?’

‘Well, it’s a thing, anyway. Look it up.’

‘And what about your daughter?’

She sighed. Indra was older, she explained. ‘She’s your age, a totally different generation. Plus, Indra’s just a really sensitive, wise sort of person.’ She’d been through some hard stuff, but now she was really flourishing. Astra was trying to let her do her own thing, which seemed to be what she wanted, some space from her parents. But being so far away from her was sometimes almost unbearable, Astra said. ‘A parent’s love for a child, you probably know this yourself, it’s pretty bottomless. It goes down into the guts of the world. But a child’s love for a parent is different. It goes up. It’s more ethereal. It’s not quite present on the earth.’