This would be a difficult subject, Emily recognised. This was an inadequate explanation of how Lucky lost control of the franchise, how he lost his money, how he ended up here. But she could revisit the question another day. For now, instead, she would offer him a story of her own. On the one hand, it might be a way to establish trust and intimacy. On the other, it might make him uncomfortable.

At home, in her bedroom, hung a small painting of a Lucky’s restaurant, a picture made by her late father, copied from a postcard, and given to Emily for her seventh birthday. Michael used to say the bright, running colours reminded him of melted plastic. It was a portrait of what Emily took to be a typical Lucky’s franchise in an Australian country town. A red dirt road, red evening sky, and gambolling children in green school hats, the shop’s signage in royal blue. Emily kept the picture in her bedroom, more or less hidden away, because she didn’t want to explain its presence to visitors. She didn’t want to tell them that her father, Ian Asquith, had killed himself when she was seven years old. She had her stepfather’s surname: Main. She didn’t want to invite questions about her father because she did not have all the answers. The painting, and perhaps the Lucky’s franchise, might have been meaningful to him, but that meaning was private, entirely lost to his daughter. Some mornings, when getting herself ready for work, the picture was another small object in her field of vision. But sometimes she looked at the painting on the bedroom wall and remembered the last day she spent with her father; in her mind she was again visiting him on an autumn day in 1971. Sometimes she tried to tell her seven-year-old self: he’s not going to live for long. Hug him, hold his hand and make him feel better and he won’t kill himself. Enjoy his company, or pretend to enjoy it. Maybe you can change his mind.

How could she explain this painting to Lucky when she hid the thing in her own bedroom, when she couldn’t explain it to herself? But maybe he was the right person to tell. Maybe he would take the picture at its simplest value: a representation of a building on her wall at home. Not a haunted picture. A representation of Lucky’s legacy, not her father’s. Maybe Lucky could transfigure the image, modify its power.

‘In a sense, I’ve been thinking about Lucky’s for a long time,’ Emily began. ‘I’ve a painting of one of your restaurants in my home.’

‘No kidding! I should have a painting like that. I got photographs, as you can see.’

‘My father painted it. He gave me the picture not long before he died.’

‘What was your father’s name?’

‘Ian Asquith.’