The first thing I noticed when we got near was a smashed Sony Walkman, utterly silenced, its guts gaping, in contrast to the body which lay very still and compact, quite flat on the road as if all the shape had escaped from it as from a puncture. He was alive though, a young man in his early twenties, olive-skinned, with a bristling black moustache, not dissimilar to Henri’s, and issuing a remote, metallic grief which reminded me eerily of the very sound you hear from someone else’s Sony Walkman headphones. Just as suddenly as the traffic had earlier evacuated the streets, so it reoccupied them now. Which meant that we were all in danger. While Ros knelt by the injured boy to cover him with her flimsy summer jacket, I waved my arms at the oncoming vehicles. The first one to stop just happened to be a taxi. I dismissed from my mind the selfish irritation at not being able to hire it to take us to the Witch’s Cauldron in Subiaco. The driver responded at first with commendable presence of mind. He parked so as to shield us from the cars, rang through on his radio for an ambulance, and ordered me – he being as much the habitual father as I am the habitual son – to rummage in his boot for a warm coat. He joined Ros by the boy and packed his coat around him. Then, for no explicable reason, except perhaps that he’d noticed that the boy wasn’t Anglo-Saxon Australian white, he decided that he might not be genuinely hurt at all. ‘Probably just a drunk,’ he said.

Ros assured him that that was not the case. ‘He’s in a lot of pain,’ she said.

The driver rolled a lazy, sceptical eye at her. Then he put his face close to the boy’s. ‘You bin drinking, mate? You ’ad a couple too many?’

The boy groaned, a low, broken cry not like that of any drunk I’d heard.

But he didn’t deceive the taxi driver. ‘Well, I’m going to have to turn you over anyway,’ he said. Some demon had taken hold of him; he began pulling at the boy, twisting him agonizingly by the shoulders.

A wash of tears from under his closed lids suddenly wet his face.

‘Don’t do that,’ Ros said.

‘He’ll be right – the bastard’s got to breathe. And you don’t want him choking on his vomit.’

The boy was howling now, trying to say something about his neck, and Ros was shouting too, almost in tears, ‘Don’t do that to him!’ And to me, ‘Don’t let him do that!’