‘It’s about sturt travelling inland to the desert with a whaling boat and two crew, missing the inland sea by millions of years.’ Patrick had taken a closer look at our father’s opera notes. ‘He’d done quite a bit of work on it. Would you have thought there’d be an opera in it? I guess Voss became one, so there you go. It’s a genre, explorer opera. What possessed Dad to wade in I just don’t know. Did you know Sturt had a whaling boat?’

‘No. All that explorer study at school, and no mention of a whaling boat.’ We were on Patrick’s balcony. He was back in town and about to sear trout. ‘How bizarre must that have been, if you were some indigenous person out there, watching this caravan come through the mulga with their cocked hats and their horses and dragging their whaler?’

The dark mass of the park lay in front of us, with its rose gardens and poinciana canopies and the wide dry lawns where families played on weekends. The buildings of the CBD, most of them still full of lights, stood up over the treetops and seemed closer than they were. A breeze wound around from the river, but sluggishly, heavy with warm, humid, salty air.

Patrick had put bowls with three kinds of olives on the glass table, and he had opened a riesling because he had suddenly had enough of sauv blancs. I had brought a sauv blanc. He sat back in his chair, the light from the cream-and-beige loungeroom angling across his face. He took an olive stone from his mouth and dropped it into the saucer in front of him.

‘Well, exactly,’ he said. ‘That comes up. I don’t know if they did the actual exploring in cocked hats, but the rest of it. It’s all there. He wanted – Dad wanted – them to build an actual boat, full size. It would have been like Fitzcarraldo, Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.’

‘I haven’t seen it.’

He picked up his wine glass, and wiped his hand across the ring of condensation it had left on the table. ‘Well neither have I, but it’s about this guy who takes a big boat over a mountain, I think. It’s one of those stories of grand folly.’

‘As far as you’re aware.’

‘As far as I’m aware, yes. You’re not telling me you have to have actually seen something to reference it? I’m sure that’s not how it works.’

‘So Fitzcarraldo could be a whimsical cartoon musical about a vainglorious yet eccentric mouse who rode in Don Quixote’s saddle bag?’

‘Well, it could. But I would have seen that, obviously. You know that’s my genre, the whole rodent-Quixote-musical-cartoon thing. Right up there with outback explorer opera.’ He leaned forward towards the olives, took a large green one from the middle bowl. ‘Where the fuck did you get an idea like that from? Shrek? You must spend a lot of time alone.’

‘I do now. And it’s good, mostly. It got noisy there for a while.’

‘Yeah. Come in and I’ll do the trout.’

He led the way to the kitchen, which was at the far end of the large open-plan living area. The water in the saucepan had come to the boil.

‘I just bought these...’ He struggled for the name, then picked up one of the two new bamboo steamer baskets he was referring to. ‘...things. Blaine took his. So I may trash the greens, but you’ll have to bear with me.’

He picked up the recipe, which he had printed from the internet. His salsa verde was in the blender, his organic veges were cut and in piles. He studied the page as if the recipe were in a tiny font, or another language in which he knew a few phrases but no more.

‘Right, trout,’ he said, and went to the fridge.

He dribbled oil in the frying pan, turned the heat up to high and lowered the two fine-looking pieces of trout in with tongs. He loaded the broccolini, beans and snow peas into the baskets and set them on the boiling water. For more than a minute he was calm, watchful. Then everything happened at once – hot oil spat from the fish, smoke started to rise from the pan, steamed billowed. I moved forward.

‘Don’t help me. I need to...’ He waved me away. ‘All right, fuck it, help me. What are you holding back for?’

I turned the heat down, took the tongs and turned the trout, and I steadied the baskets. ‘Just fine-tuning. That’s all.’ I would be buying him a knife next.

‘Oh god,’ he said as he shovelled it dispiritedly onto plates. ‘You don’t realise how dependent you are. Bloody Blaine.’

He gave me knives and forks and took the plates himself and led the way back out to the semi-darkness of the balcony. Dependent. I hadn’t been dependent. Blaine going was like Patrick having an organ removed. Jess going put me in a haze, but it wasn’t the same. I played that night. I cooked in the next town without catastrophe.

The salsa verde was great, and I told him so.

‘Did I tell you how it ended with Blaine?’ he said. ‘Did I tell you that?’ He hadn’t. He knew he hadn’t. ‘We had a friend – she’s still a friend – and she asked us ... she asked if Blaine would give her his sperm. She and her partner decided they’d rather do that than go to a lesbo-friendly sperm bank. They said they would have asked me but, you know, heart disease and cancer, what can you do? Dud family history.’

‘They’d be smarter genes than Blaine’s.’

‘I like the catty stuff, you know?’ he said, mock-seriously, pointing at me with his fork. ‘I like the catty stuff from you about that dumb arsehole with a family history of long life, long tedious life. Anyway, I thought he should do it. Worse than that, way worse, I made the mistake of saying, “It’d be great to have a child in our lives”.’ He measured it out word by word as though it was the most categorically stupid thing he could have said. He made his non-fork hand into a pistol, held it to his head, and fired. ‘Well, didn’t that open up a can of worms? A lot of ridiculous dog and fence talk, and the screech of commitment-phobic tyres as Blaine and his worldly goods left the scene.’ He took a pause, to allow the image to settle. ‘All right, it wasn’t quite that quick. But you get my point.’ Patrick with a child in his life – I had never contemplated the possibility, never thought he had either. The child would have been well dressed at least, or expensively dressed anyway. ‘I read that you heard by email. From Jess. I mean, I know we talked at the time, but I didn’t know that. That can’t be a good way.’

‘I heard it got some coverage. I didn’t look. I don’t think anyone, any outlet, had the actual email though.’ He didn’t contradict me. ‘There was an email. So the story might have had some truth to it. But it wasn’t one email. Nothing’s ever that simple.’ It didn’t make a lot more sense to me now than it had on that kerb in Louisville, looking down at the gravel and the bottle tops in the gutter, reading her half-dozen hurried sentences properly for the first time. ‘I think it was just ... a necessary thing for Jess to do. Someone had to make a move, a clear move. It was the right thing for both of us. I wasn’t really doing my bit. I got married in the wrong state of mind. Dad had just died and...’ Nothing was certain then. Nothing. That fucking clown stole my watch and put it in a balloon. ‘We got married in a stupid wedding chapel in Nevada.’

‘I would have liked to have been there.’ It came out sounding oddly formal, like a written RSVP in the negative from someone who, try as they might, couldn’t make the date work. It was his way of sounding less angry than he was, or had been.

‘Yeah. And if it happens again, you will be. I’ll need some style advice. It was sorely lacking on the day. We got married after the soundcheck. Jess lodged the papers while we were doing the show. Derek announced it to the audience, naturally.’ To a perplexed silence, then cheering. I had to take a bow. ‘When I came back here, a month ago or whatever, I flew in via Sydney. I had one of those annoying transfers where you have to pick up your bags and re-check. So I changed to a later flight and I caught a cab to Balmain and I stood outside her door. But I couldn’t think of anything to say. So I left. I went back to the airport. She was probably there, in her house. It was early.’ It was a terrace house, about a hundred years old. All the curtains were closed. It had a Brunswick green fence with a matching mailbox. We had bought furniture together in Brisbane but not a house, though we had talked about it. Whenever Jess pushed the idea, it was never the right time. So she rented some storage space, let her job go and joined the band on the road. ‘I didn’t really have a plan. We just hadn’t had contact for a while. Most of the sorting out had been by email, and it had all been very decent, but...’

‘But you’d know she’s getting married again. You would have heard that from her.’

I felt like I was falling, a long way and into something dark. It was hard to breathe. Married again. He had really said that. ‘No. No, I haven’t heard from her for a while.’ I was looking at the table, at an ant that was crawling across the glass. Even my own voice seemed like it was coming from far away.

‘Oh. She sent out a group email, but I figured she’d talked to you separately. That was a couple of months ago. I don’t know the details. I think they met through touch football, right after she moved to Sydney.’ He was talking quickly, shoving information in front of me in case it helped. ‘He had one of those names like Jason, or something like that. I’ve probably still got the email.’

‘Don’t send it.’