Ally noted the change of topic. She was tempted to ask if Huda had attended any of the election rallies she’d spotted, with musicians and dancers onstage, and secret police skulking about the fringes. But a voice inside her said, Why ruin a lovely afternoon? She told herself to keep quiet, to enjoy this riverside picnic, like her mother had done so often thirty years ago. Ally stared at the limitless sky and wondered, Was her mother up there, with her father, in a paradise colored perfect blue? Guilt prodded her chest. Her father wouldn’t want her here, in Baghdad, trying to dig up the past.

“The past is dead, that’s what your mother used to say,” he answered, every time Ally asked about her or the portrait that supposedly went missing during their voyage from the United States to Australia. “She’d want us to get on with our lives. It doesn’t help to dwell.”

If she persisted with her questions, he’d go silent. Before too long, Ally knew she’d find him drowning his sorrows in a long-necked bottle of beer, and David Bowie would reappear on the record player in the lounge room.

Young Ally couldn’t understand it. Her dad loved her mother, with her adventurous, globe-trotting past. He sought solace in Ziggy Stardust, jetting off in his starship toward an unknown universe. But perhaps, as he listened to Bowie wail that nothing will keep us together, he was reminding himself that it was best to stay rooted in the present, feet firmly planted in the safety of his own backyard. It was cold and lonely up among the stars.

Ally tried to stay out of sight. She tiptoed silently up and down the hallway between her bedroom and the lounge room, guilty and fearful of what her questions had unleashed. Her father’s pain emanated from the lounge room, growing larger and more palpable with every song, with every trip to the fridge to collect another beer. What would happen if she insisted on answers? she wondered. Her father’s grief was almost a creature unto itself. It had a pulse. She was too scared to test it, but she suspected it had teeth too. Teeth that could bite.

Eventually, the neighbors complained about the loud music that went on until dawn, and her grandparents noticed the pyramid of beer bottles collecting by the back door. One day, when Ally was at a friend’s house, they staged some sort of intervention. Her father promised to pull himself together. And when Ally got home, her grandma made her promise she’d stop asking about things that made her dad sad.