‘Suit yourself,’ I said. I took my notebook out and scribbled a few words on it. ‘I’m going tomorrow,’ I went on; ‘I’ve got to have someone for the Brisbane section. If I can’t have Mister Kurtz I’ll have to have you. Publishers don’t normally make for interesting reading, but I can jazz you up a bit. What was that about fuckwits again?’

The tense angles of his body somewhat belied the wicked twinkle, or vice versa. ‘You bastard, Jacobson,’ he said.

‘Good to see you again, anyway,’ he lied, as I rose to leave.

‘You too,’ I pretended to agree.

We gripped each other’s hand firmly. It was like the locking of horns. In the old days I used to arm wrestle all my friends, and had we both been younger we could easily have gone in for a bit of that now. In the English-speaking world there really is only Australia where you can get that from your mates.

As we parted it occurred to me that I didn’t in fact know who he was and that we might never have met in Melbourne after all. The more I thought about it the more likely I decided it was that we’d never addressed a word to each other until tonight.

Not that it seemed to matter.

We went on from this encounter to hear Hemi sing at the Port Office Hotel in Edward Street. Hemi was a nice, quiet, plump, bespectacled Jewish boy from Tel Aviv who used to be a tank commander in the Israeli army and was now the hottest rock sensation in Brisbane. I’d read about him in the local newspaper; how he’d turned up in Queensland three and a half years previously, supporting himself on a round the world trip by doing odd jobs, a spot of cleaning, some busking, that sort of thing, and then, virtually overnight, had become a pop idol – not anywhere else, just here in Brissie.

We had to fight our way through the crowds at the Port Office to get to the bar, and we had to fight even harder to get anywhere near the stage. I was surprised at how young the audience was. Given that Hemi’s repertoire included ‘Hava Nagila’ and ‘American Pie’ you would have thought his fans would have all been my age. But no; he had found a way through to the kids of Brisbane and they cheered and stomped and did as they were told when he waved his guitar around and shouted, ‘Everybody sing – I can’t get no – o – o . . .’