Mike mumbled something and pointed to a chair. I sat down. The table was covered in newspapers, which he began condensing nervously into three bundles of apparent significance. Later, when he was out of the room, I looked at them more closely and saw that they were all from the 1990s. The rest of the house was very dark, and it was hard to get a sense of how big it was or what it might have been like during the day. The rooms were small, I could tell that much, cluttered with the blurry shapes of books and ornaments and furniture that had presumably belonged to Mike’s mother, Vesna, with who — as I would learn — he’d been living for some years. Many of the objects had an antique feel; heavy pieces of wooden furniture and, along the walls, bookshelves, black-and-white photographs, and shadows that loomed like dolls and teapots. Vesna had died the year before last, Mike told me at some point that evening, at the age of ninety-eight, and eventually I was allowed to turn the plastic pages of an old album, in which I saw photos of her smoking defiantly, her knitted cardigan littered with Communist badges, trade-union badges, environmental badges, anti-uranium badges. Better Active Today than Radioactive Tomorrow! She had been a powerful woman in her youth, and a fierce Communist apparently, who seemed, in these photos anyway, to grow larger as she aged until, in her nineties, still a smoker, still covered in badges, she was a sort of titan with huge arms and swollen purple ankles. She had died on a tram of a heart attack and been carried across the city, from Airport West to Elizabeth Street and back, no one knew how many times, before someone finally noticed that she was dead. Mike, who had been a tram conductor until the system was privatised in the nineties, when his job was replaced by machines, was understandably disturbed by this. I watched his face twitch as he spoke about it, but his delicate voice barely changed its modulation. And that must have been the moment that I began noticing the crucifixes. They had been attached to the walls all around us, and seemed to emerge, one by one, from the dimness, like those glow-in-the-dark stars that kids stick onto the ceiling. But whether they’d been stuck there by Mike or by his mother, I didn’t ask.

‘What was it?’ Mike said, looking down at his hands. ‘A green Beetle?’

We were drinking black tea, and rakia from a tall, unmarked bottle, and talking about the footage that Astra had mentioned, the footage of my dad spinning around on the Tullamarine freeway.

‘Dad’s car?’ I said. ‘No. A Monaro. A yellow Monaro.’

‘Yellow? Was it?’ Mike murmured. ‘Bird-shit yellow? Yeah, could have been, I guess.’