‘A person who has never been outside the realm of reality wouldn’t understand,’ Mike was saying. And though I couldn’t understand exactly what he was talking about, I felt, I think, that I did understand, and that I agreed. I could sense some deep magic working through whatever we were doing there that night, protecting us. We were very drunk. We were speeding back along the Tullamarine freeway by this point, with the windows open. And if this had been a story, or a film for that matter, then we would have crashed and died for sure, because such hubris cannot be rewarded.

But we didn’t. We escaped with our lives. We were rewarded.

13.

13.

A few weeks after these events, I flew up to the Gold Coast for my mother’s birthday. We sat at the dinner table on the seventeenth floor with Bill, and Tara, and Tara’s nice husband, Gus, and their two little girls, and we got drunk and ate roast turkey because we thought we may as well pretend it was Christmas while we were at it. It was thirty-two degrees. Sarah and Sylvie stayed home.

After lunch, and after we had drunk as much of Bill’s famous wine collection as we could, I found myself sitting on the floor of my mother’s bedroom, hiccuping, with a few decades’ worth of old photos scattered across the white carpet. And among them, of course, was the photograph of my father, looking very, very, very happy in his orange robes. My father, who I loved, suddenly, and who looked so young and beautiful. He was wearing a long set of beads around his neck, and even though his clothes were grubby, there was something radiant about him, his face, his eyes. It seemed as if he’d been washed clean. My mother had told me she had no idea where that photo had got to. But here it was. It had been in her bedroom all along. She’d also told me she didn’t know anything about my father’s time in the ashram. But that wasn’t strictly true, either.

I found my mother in the kitchen, smiling drunkenly. She looked like an old woman, I saw now. Older and weaker, and dodderingly pleased to have both her children in the same building at once, if not all her grandchildren. Pleased, too, it seemed to me, that we’d all be gone by tomorrow evening, and that her life without us would soon begin again. She had skin like thin, crumpled paper that had been flattened out, hair that she had stopped dyeing blonde, and very tired black eyes. Tired, but also strangely canny, I thought, strangely wild. She was a survivor, my mother. She fiddled with her hearing aid and peered at me.

‘You look a bit worse for wear,’ she said.

‘Thanks, Mum.’

I showed her the photo.