March brought wind and rain. April, clear skies and a calm of ordinary, and then it was May, the month of perfect nights. Warm enough for covers to slip off the bed, but cool enough to sleep right through without waking; without needing to turn the pillow or stand naked in the dark against a eucalyptus.

There were a million things whose lives took up after dark at Magpie Beach. Feral cats and rats and possums ran across the roof. Whiskery things stripped bark from trees, sucked fruit and snapped at smaller things which buzzed and hummed. Roosting birds were woken, frogs sang, fruit fell, but it wasn’t one of the usual night-time noises that slipped in to me with the moths that night. This was slower and steadier than a scurry. Heavier than anything that lived in the bush, and the laboured breath, the sniff, and stifled cough were unmistakably human.

I wondered if curiosity had got the better of Rosemary Lamb. I thought about Jessie Else, who was still missing, and I lay very still.

The shuffling stopped and I knew he was looking in the window before my eyes adjusted. The breeze was snubbed, and in its place crept the smell of butter menthol. He was thin, as pale as curd, and looking straight at me.

The Englishwoman’s taxi driver asked me once if I’d ever seen the Old Man. It wasn’t her usual driver. This one was early and caught me with a skirt of mangoes. He’d got out to stretch his legs and pushed his Winfield Blue into the space between us but pocketed the packet before I shook my head.

The Englishwoman’s usual driver never got out of the car, even when he brought her home. He never helped her with her shopping, and often stayed for half an hour enjoying his library book and a sandwich, with an elbow out the window and a sweating Coca-Cola on the dashboard. ‘He can’t possibly have read all of those already,’ Catherine would say, but he read a lot of murder mysteries and courtroom dramas and they’re not easy to put down once you’ve picked them up. I walked past him sometimes, waiting in his taxi on the can’t-park bit of William Street, reading, always reading. He’d barely look up when a fare climbed in the back, just keep reading till they settled in and told him where to go. His name was Ted Henney. I didn’t know this other one, though I remember looking at the badge clipped to the pocket of his shirt and thinking that it didn’t look like him. He had a moustache in the photograph and longer hair that curled around his collar.

‘Bit of a handful, I think,’ he said, meaning the Old Man.

I thought of a handful of something: sand trickling between fingers, splashing a face as fast as you could keep enough water in cupped palms; something alive and trying to get away running hand over hand over hand. And then the taxi was gone. The Englishwoman had arrived and climbed in the back and been driven off to town. She might have said good morning. The taxi driver probably said goodbye.

The old man in the dark wore a tie. That’s what made me think of English. His being at my window in the dead of night said he was The Englishman (capital E), the Englishwoman’s husband. A Bit-of-a-Handful, he’d slipped through her fingers, and here he was for me to catch like a mouse down the back of a sofa.

‘Please help me.’ The words peeled off him like a bandage.

I hurried into my dressing-gown and outside.

‘I don’t know where I am,’ he said, looking at his slippers. They were tartan with the toes worn through. When I went to take his arm, he pulled away, but there was no strength in it, and he slumped against the window.

It wasn’t easy for him to talk. His face twitched and his mouth watered. ‘No,’ he told me. ‘Don’t!’ And I felt sorry for the Englishwoman, this woman I’d glimpsed but never met, hidden away with this shell of a man. ‘Don’t take me back.’ Who was she to him now?

My grandfather lost his memory. At the start, we talked of it as something that might be found at any minute. There was no fancy word for it back then, or if there was, it wasn’t a word you heard on the radio. I wonder if that was better for him—never knowing how bad he was likely to get. When the first of his memories slipped out of reach, when he drummed his fingers against his forehead and squeezed his eyes shut trying to catch the thread of them, he wouldn’t have known that it would go so far beyond not knowing what he had for breakfast, that in time he wouldn’t know his own name, and beyond that (if he lived that long) he wouldn’t know why his mouth was watering and even if he did he wouldn’t know how to swallow. I don’t think that he ever completely lost his wife. He didn’t always know her name or recognise her face, but her voice anchored him like nothing else. When his mind began to trick him and his fight-or-flight responses kicked in violently, it was her voice that reeled him back. ‘It’s me, Vernon. It’s Nancy.’ He’d put down the shoe, the plate or book and give her his hand. Mum would sweep us out like a broom, away down the street and onto the bus back home.

‘What’s wrong with Pops?’ my brother often asked, but I never did, even though I was younger. I knew he’d gone, melted away like snow.

When he died, Granny set him up on a cloud with Jesus and King George. ‘God will take care of him now,’ she said. She never gave Him any of the blame.

It was three o’clock in the morning by the time I got the Englishman home. It was easy to follow the track that crossed the headland, but the Englishman walked slowly and stopped when his slippers filled with leaves and stones. ‘Please, no,’ he said when I slipped them off one at a time to tip them out, and, over and over again: ‘I’m sorry.’

A light wind caught and rained a slight saltwater shower against us as we climbed the three stone steps to their front door. There was a can of insect repellent and a mat (Please wipe your feet), a pair of shoes beside it, each shoe wrapped in plastic like a hunk of cheddar.

I knocked twice—a force of habit from another life—and after a moment there was movement and light.

‘Who’s there?’

She didn’t open the door completely but peered out from a strip of white, her face milky and drawn. She was so much shorter than me it was like looking down at a child. Chin high, sinews stretching like the strings of an instrument, a nightgown gathered at her neck like a PE bag, and there was sleep in her eyes and grey hollows beneath them. How long had she slept peacefully before the rap of knuckles?

‘We don’t keep any money in the house,’ she told me, a hint of tobacco on her breath.

‘I have your husband,’ I said. I didn’t tell her that I knew he’d run away.

The door opened a little wider. ‘He’s ill,’ she said. She knew I knew. ‘He’s not the man I married.’

When he saw her, the Englishman began to cry. He put his hands up to his face. The backs of them were loose and spotted like the belly of an old dog.

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled one last time, and added, so quietly I could barely hear him: ‘I won’t do it again.’

I looked away while she took his elbow and drew him gently back inside their home. ‘Where were you off to then?’ She sounded like my mother (Where do you think you’re going? What do you think you’re doing?) ‘Now, let’s let this lady get back to bed.’ And to me: ‘We’re sorry to have put you to such trouble, dear.’

‘No trouble.’ But we both knew that it had been. What I meant was that I didn’t mind. It didn’t matter.

She didn’t say goodnight. She just pushed the door shut and double-locked it.

If there’s anything I can do, people say, but there’s nothing ever can be done by those who need to ask.