That’s all I remember him telling me, though the words might have changed in my memory. I suspect he told me some of the stories – they still thrilled him – but none of them remain, no matter how hard I try to salvage them. The dislocation of my dream is of another order, and yet I experience it, like my father, as one of language. My parents spoke Turkish to me in our home in Istanbul, though they spoke Arabic to each other. My father also spoke fluent German, though he never spoke a word of it to me or my mother as far as I recall. And yet when my father and I speak to each other in the dream, it is in German.

Two weeks before the accident, I found myself thinking again about my father and his life. I was at an exhibition of paintings by Francis Bacon, which I’d come upon after walking up from the harbour in the nearby Botanical Gardens. I didn’t like the paintings, but there was something in them that troubled me, and the afternoon I thought again of my father was the fourth afternoon I had been to look at them in a week. Bacon paints bodies that are tortured, stunted, caged, displayed, turned inside out or outside in (it’s never clear exactly), allowed an escape but not wanting one, perhaps because, despite the mutilation, there is no suffering, it seems, no pain, which is exactly what history does to the past, to the reality of human wretchedness – history and dreams – it divests it of its pain. Bacon’s paintings look as if a human being has passed over them, leaving behind a trail of its presence, just as history and dreams, like a snail, leave their slime.

I was familiar with the area around Rachel Forster Hospital. It doubled as a community centre. I used to ride my bike on the footpath around the hospital. No one talked about communities when I was growing up. Katherine was worse. My second foster parents (I had five before I came of age – in Katherine, Redfern, Bourke, Broken Hill and Cessnock – with a brief time at an orphanage in Lismore between Bourke and Broken Hill) lived two blocks away, on Raglan Street, in the shadow of the tower blocks. I must have gone to school around here too, but I remember nothing of it. All I remember is riding round and round the hospital, slowing to peer in through the doors whenever they’d open, hoping to see I don’t know what.