At some point, the share house where he was living fell apart. He ran out of money. His camera broke. His actors disappeared or were imprisoned or died of drug overdoses. Mike entered a period that he didn’t remember very well. He stopped even trying to make films. He set fire to a lot of things. The Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital, as it was known then, was a horrible place, he said. Bedlam, they used to call it. And then there was a period following that, a much happier time that he didn’t remember very well either, which he spent as a voluntary outpatient at the Parkville Psychiatric Clinic under the supervision of a doctor called Dick Ball.

‘Funny name,’ Mike agreed, refilling my glass, ‘but a lovely bloke.’ Mike had walked into the doctor’s office one spring day, and there on the wall was a poster of Krishnamurti. ‘It was a sign.’

By this point I was struggling to focus on anything Mike was saying. We had drunk quite a lot of rakia. The room had begun to spin. And maybe that was when I noticed the crucifixes for the first time, gathering around me. It’s hard to say now. And then I was climbing into the passenger seat of Mike’s tiny Hyundai Excel. But where were we going? The quiet shops were suddenly flashing past. The gearbox roared to catch up. I remember passing Priceline, Helloworld, Home of Beauty, Chinamax, Lazy Moe’s. The green lights were invisible; the red lights seemed to burn in the darkness. And then we were on the Tullamarine freeway, which was a hell of a lot bigger than it used to be, Mike told me, which was a chaos of half-finished new lanes, fresh-flowered embankments, piles of rubble and dirt, and machines slowly turning in the yellow light. The car shuddered on the unfinished tarmac as we approached the airport. Is that where he was taking me? To the airport? We passed the long-term carpark, still glowing there like an abandoned city. We passed the airport altogether. Temporary walls closed in on either side, a kind of tunnel, which suddenly fell away, and then we entered the almost absolute darkness of the paddocks.

Something had happened to Mike, I realised. It was as if a switch had been flicked in his brain. He was smiling now, or grimacing happily, he was buoyant, waving his hands in the air. He was saying something about a science fiction movie he wanted to make. And it occurred to me then that I had entrusted my life to a man who was not only very drunk, but also probably insane.

Mike pulled into a gravel carpark and switched the engine off.

I looked around.

There was a food-truck glowing in the darkness, and some kids running around in Spiderman outfits. In front of us, an immense black paddock lay glittering with garbage in the headlights of parked cars.