I could see now that there was no threat in him, nothing in the way of physical power. There was only the haunted look of his face, and that was his concern, not mine. ‘I’m walking up the hill to my home. You can join me or not.’

‘Then I shall,’ he said, and grimaced. I had hit him hard. ‘My name is Srinivas. You may have heard of me.’

~

Well, I had and I hadn’t.

Srinivas was the lascar, I was fairly sure.

I’d never heard the name, but there was a Bengali who lived at the centre of the stories my father had told me. He would be as old now as this man. It was the nature of my relationship with my father that in our long hours together he would become reflective and summon stories from his bones. One of them came from his time as a young lieutenant working as an aide to Governor Hunter, commissioned to investigate the strange affair of the Sydney Cove. An irresistible tale for a child—a distant shipwreck, the mysterious disappearance of almost all those who attempted the long walk to safety—salted with dark places and monsters. Clark, responsible for the ship’s cargo, the bearer of unexplained wounds, who absconded at the earliest opportunity. Mister Figge, a shadowy figure in the tales, rendered compelling by the disgust, the horrified intimacy that animated my father when he spoke of him. The man was a tumour in him. He blamed Figge for the deaths of the missing souls and attempted to arrest him, whereupon he attacked my father with a knife and took off on a stolen horse. My father carried wounds, I understood, whose exact nature was not to be discussed.

Of all his tales, this one I could not ask to be told. He spoke of it only when he was morose, and then his gaze would drift, his voice would start at a murmur that scarcely shifted the silence. A man who had no wife, a widower in heart and temperament, a man with no one to hear him but an insatiably curious child. Later, as the drink took him, the account would be tinted with sarcasm and doubt. As I reached that age where children start their questions, my father would offer only fragments, the gaps filled by others and their rumours.