I tried to say something, but Mike told me to be quiet.

And then we saw it. At first I thought it was the moon emerging from behind a cloud. Slowly it flooded the air around it with light, and then it began to blink; it changed from being a moon into an object that was coming towards us. Its lights multiplied. We could hear it. It became an aeroplane driving straight at us. We got out and stood in front of the car. Mike handed me the bottle of rakia. Someone screamed. And then it was on us like surf, roaring through the darkness above our heads, its huge, naked underbelly intimate and deadly as a shark. When it passed, we turned and watched it waver like a giant horizontal crucifix, and then descend towards the pulsing lights of the runway. I remember Mike’s face. He looked younger. He looked ecstatic. These aeroplanes would be in the movie too, he assured me. In fact, this is where his new film would begin, he said, holding up his fingers to simulate a tiny camera frame. ‘Right here, staring at the darkness, like this.’

We sat and drank on the bonnet of the car for quite a while that night, while Mike told me about the movie he was writing. It would be called Tullamarine, he said, in honour of the suburb, the freeway, and the airport, which were all named after a Wurundjeri man called Tullamareena, who had resisted the British occupation and been imprisoned in the very first Melbourne gaol in 1838. Tullamareena had set fire to the roof. Then he’d lifted himself through the flaming hole and escaped, while the gaol burnt to the ground.

‘What a fucking hero!’ Mike exclaimed.

Now he wanted to make a film about this man, his first film in nearly fifty years, which would move in time between the 1830s and the 1990s and would astound the whole country, if only he could get the money, Mike said, if only it wasn’t always the same nine or ten people who got all the money to make all the same insipid little films, year after year. Melbourne Airport had been named, however inadvertently, after an Aboriginal resistance fighter, and while it was a paltry recompense, obviously, it seemed nevertheless — and this was the logic of his film (a film I knew he would never make) — that Melbourne Airport itself was a burning prison, or the ghost of a burning prison, or some sort of secret star gate, and that by escaping in the way he did, Tullamareena had somehow punched a hole in the air and invented human flight.