This footage, those burnouts — that was what I really wanted to see. But it was long gone. At some point in the mid-seventies, Mike had destroyed everything.

Had it happened the way Astra described?

Mike stood up, took a few steps, then sat down again.

‘Some of that sounds sort of right,’ he said, pouring us both more rakia. ‘But I don’t remember Astra being there.’

‘Really?’

He lit another cigarette. ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ he said, ‘it was just me and your dad.’

‘Okay,’ I said, watching his face as he smoked. It was smooth, open — strangely childlike, in fact, in its openness — and yet it nevertheless suggested years of invisible damage. He was someone around who, it seemed, undecided forces continued to coalesce. Luck and its opposite circled him hungrily.

Now that I knew the footage was gone, I wasn’t sure what else I could do there.

I asked Mike about the film he’d been trying to make. ‘What happened to that in the end? Did you finish it?’

He looked at me for a second with what I took to be undisguised loathing. Who is this prick, he must have thought, come to wake up old demons. But he didn’t say that. He just looked away, and I watched him watching his own hands in silence, stretching his big fingers back and forth to the point where the pain began or where it became too much.

But he did tell me, eventually.

The movie itself, he explained — Strange Lands Under the Fires of Heaven — was never made, though he did remember the plot, such as it was. A group of anarchists, pursued by a corrupt cop tentatively named ‘Fucknuckle’, take shelter in the mountains. One night, during a storm, they discover ‘the helmsman’, a grisly old hermit covered in scabs and ash, who keeps guard at a mysterious hole in the ground.

Things descend into madness. Literally. That was going to be the line on the poster, Mike explained. ‘There was a guy who lived with us there in Chaucer Street, who did these great posters.’

The anarchists overpower the helmsman and then, one by one, they lower themselves into the hole.

‘And then what?’ I asked.

‘Fucked if I know,’ Mike said. ‘Madness, I guess. It was a pretty strange time. But I bet everyone says that.’