She rolled her eyes. ‘You really want to do this again?’ she said.

But we’d never done it. That was the whole point. We skated across the surface. It was in our blood. We reeled away whenever the charge of reality became too strong.

‘Your father lived in an ashram for a month or two in 1976,’ my mother said. ‘He wore orange. He meditated. He sang the bloody songs. What else can I tell you?’

‘What ashram?’

‘The Osho ashram. That Indian bloke with all the Rolls-Royces. Bhagwan. Bag-wash, we used to call him.’

‘How many Rolls-Royces did he have?

‘Oh, I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘A hundred and something?’

So my dad had fallen in with a guru who really liked cars. Maybe that wasn’t so weird.

‘And then what happened?’

‘Nothing,’ my mother said. ‘When he’d had enough, he came back to Australia. He had a friend called Havoc who was looking after Byron Street while he was away, and I knew Havoc a bit, and he put on a big surprise party to welcome Vincent home. I’ve told you all this. I went along because it was a party, even though I didn’t know who the hell Vincent was.’

‘What happened to Havoc?’ I asked.

‘He died ages ago,’ she said. ‘Some sort of brain haemorrhage. Anyway, there were all these people who knew Vincent, and they were all going: “Geez I can’t wait for Vince to get home”, and I was saying “Ahh fucking hell, really?” But then he turned up and we got together just like that.’

She handed me a biscuit with cheese. ‘So there you go,’ she said. ‘Happy?’

‘Was Dad still wearing orange when you guys got together?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He’d renounced by that stage.’

‘Renounced? Are you serious? Why do I not know this?’

‘You do. You know all this. I keep telling you the same thing over and over again.’

‘You never said the word “renounced”.’

‘You’re like me,’ she said. ‘You’re very vague. You don’t listen properly.’

‘But what happened? Did something happen that made him renounce?’

‘Why do you think something must have happened?’ my mother said. ‘He just grew out of it, like the rest of them. It’d be a bit boring being in a cult, don’t you reckon?’

She began stacking the dishwasher.

‘Rinse those, would you,’ she said, pointing to a pile of dirty plates on the bench.