I had no answer, and turned the question back to her. It turned out not to be simple for her, either. Her father’s family was Ukrainian, her mother’s family were Bundjalung people. She lived in Brisbane, but her country—Bundjalung country— was the far north coast of New South Wales. That was where she was from.

I was surprised by a sudden savage envy. In spite of all the damage that had been done to indigenous families and their connection to their country, she could go to a particular spot on the planet and say, this is where I’m from. So could all those English people around us: that man feeding chips into his mouth as if it were a shredder, the synchronised sippers, now both sliding the cups onto their saucers. If you asked them, they’d probably be able to tell you about some village in Cheshire or Yorkshire or Wales where their ancestors were buried. That would be where they were from.

So I sat gawping at Melissa, who was waiting for me to work out a response to the simplest question in the world. By way of answer, I told her a bit of the Wiseman story. ‘My great-great-great grandfather was born in London…’ I began. I got to the bit about ‘he was freed and took up land on the Hawkesbury’.

‘What do you mean “took up”?’ she said. ‘He took.’

He took up land on the Hawkesbury. They were the words from the family story: a formula, unquestionable. I’d been repeating them for years.

Took up: you took up something that was lying around. You took up something that was on offer. You took up hobbies and sports.

Took had many more possibilities. You took something because it was there, like a coin on the ground. You took offence or flight or a bath. Or you took something away from someone else.

The words took up were standing in for some set of actions. The words weren’t the thing itself, they only pointed towards it. The thing itself lay behind the words, an object behind a screen. Of course I’d always known that. But the lack of fit between a word and the thing it stood for had never before come to me like a punch in the stomach.

Took up—suddenly it felt like a trick.

The trick itself was bad enough. The fact that I’d let myself be taken in by it was worse. Melissa and I had exchanged such small and harmless words. Family. From. Took up. But they were turning out to be grenades.

Twenty-five years earlier, I’d arrived in London on a working holiday visa. For my generation, it was what you did: you went to Britain, because Britain was what you knew. I’d grown up learning by heart the Kings and Queens of England, the Principal Industries of Nottingham and Sheffield. I knew all about daffodils and cuckoos, about Biggles and the Battle of Britain. The cultural landscape of my generation was almost wholly British. It made for an awkward lack of fit between the cultural landscape—so vividly real in your head—and the one outside the window.