MINDING LEAR

Money was scarce at the end of the university year. Well, it was always scarce, but then it was just that twitchy time between the end of lectures and the start of exams. My landlady said a friend of hers was wanting someone to look after her old dad for a few days while she and her husband had a break. Fifty dollars a day with food and accommodation, and I could spend most of the time swotting, my landlady said, because no doubt the old guy would mainly be sleeping. Maybe Mrs Lills was keen on me taking it because she’d be sure of her last few weeks’ rent. Maybe her motives were altruistic and she wanted to help both me and her friend.

Mrs Lills was a tall woman with skin like a trout’s belly, and everything she cooked was stringy like herself, but she set very few rules in her house and didn’t interfere in my life. Mr Lills was a diesel mechanic and away most of the time on offshore fishing boats. Occasionally when I came in for a meal he’d be there, his nails ringed with grease, and he never recognised my presence, never spoke a word, as if we were on separate planes of existence, although sharing the same time and space. I wondered sometimes if we would be able to walk through each other with just the whisper of images passing.

Angeline Moffit was the friend’s name, and she said if I was interested in the terms, I could come over the next morning, or the one after, to meet her dad, but no later because she had to get someone sorted as soon as possible. Angeline and her husband were going to Nelson for several days. She said the doctor told her it was imperative she have a break, absolutely imperative. I could tell from her voice that she was gratified to be the recipient of such an impressive word. My landlady said that wasn’t the all of it: their marriage had been drifting, and Nelson was a second-chance honeymoon.

I went over on the morning after. The Moffits lived in Rosedown, close to the golf course, and seemed to be better off than my landlady. They had ranchslider doors that opened onto a broad concrete patio on which old man Ladd sat in a substantial chair among lesser, white plastic ones.

‘Dad,’ said Angeline Moffit, ‘this is Brian who’s going to keep you company when we’re away.’

‘Away?’ said Dad.

‘To Nelson and Blenheim. We talked about it, and Brian’s going to make sure you’re okay.’

‘Brian?’ said Dad. Later I was to realise that Dad was at his best in the mornings, and that’s why Angeline Moffit had asked me to call round then.

Mr Ladd was eighty-eight, and suffering some sort of painless physical implosion: a big man, collapsing in on himself, so that his shoulders were no longer at right angles to his spine and his head hung like a pendulum in front of his concave chest. His daughter told me he’d been the manager of an engineering firm with two hundred and seventy people, and five branches in the North Island, but what had once been robust and secular appeared to me at first sight mournful, pious and ecclesiastic. His hands were steepled in supplication, his large eyes upturned in abandoned sockets and shadowed by thickets of grey eyebrows.

‘Brian’s coming back on Sunday, Dad,’ Angeline Moffit said, ‘and he’ll be company for you when we’re away.’

Dad didn’t say anything, but his eyes rolled at me for a moment, and the bones of his chin worked loosely, like a hand beneath a sheet.

On Sunday after lunch I put a few clothes, my books and swot notes in my squash bag and went out to Rosedown on my Suzuki. Angeline and her husband were keen to get on their way, enjoy the imperative break from work stress, and achieve the equally imperative repair in their marriage perhaps. She said she’d written everything down on a pad by the phone, but she went over it quickly nevertheless. The first commandment, and underlined, said Dad must never be left alone. So much for squash, I thought. ‘Dad’s doctor is Dr Morley Smith,’ said Angeline. ‘I’ve got the number there, except he’s away at present and someone’s standing in.’ They drove away in a white Corona and, after a quick wave to me, I could see them shrug off care and begin a relaxed conversation.

Dad and I had a little more difficulty gaining rapport. He was convinced I was a spray man come to moss-proof the roof tiles, and didn’t see why he should have to pay me to watch television with him. ‘It’s too windy to spray right now,’ I told him, and although there wasn’t a breath outside, he was mollified. I cottoned on early that it was more productive to debate with Dad on his own terms than appeal to reality.

Women’s beach volleyball was the TV programme, and Dad and I sat in the creaking Sunday afternoon and let time pass. The women were powerful, yet shapely, and Dad nodded and blinked, sometimes scratching the top of one hand with the fingers of the other. There are some big dogs which are very lugubrious, ears, lower eyelids and the gleaming sides of their mouths all drawn down. Dad was a bit like that, but his skin in parts was scaled like a dragon’s. When the volleyball women had stopped flopping onto their backs in the silky sand, Dad forgot the television and told me it was time for wine and cheese.

I wondered if he was having me on, but the checklist by the phone had no prohibition on wine and cheese. There was one of those round, soft bries in the fridge, and cans of local beer. Dad was interested in the cheese, but waved the beer aside. ‘Wine, Mr Mildew, wine,’ he said in a tone that implied he was humouring me rather than the other way around. The effort of getting out of the lounge chair gave him hiccups, and when I followed him through the house, rather than discovering wine, we ended in the sunroom, where Dad stood behind the warm glass and looked over the golf course. I discovered a rack of bottles in the cupboard under the stairs, and took a pinot noir back to the sunroom as an incentive for Dad to return back to the lounge. His eyes hardly left the bottle, and he stopped only twice for a hiccup session. ‘Now you’re talking,’ he said. ‘Who did you say you were again?’

‘Brian.’

‘And what do you do in the firm?’ he said.

‘I’m just here to keep you company till your daughter’s back.’

Dad gave a shuddering yawn which ended in hiccups, and after shuffling into a calculated position with his bum towards the big chair, let himself fall back into it. Wine cured his hiccups and took the place of conversation. I watched some European soccer, and soon Dad was dozing with a piece of cheese, like a nub of chalk, in the hand resting on his lap. Awake, or asleep, he breathed always through his mouth, and his lips had an absolute demarcation between the dry, faded outer rind and the gleaming red swell within.

Angeline hadn’t left a great deal of prepared food — perhaps she thought I had to earn my money somehow — but there was a large packet of savouries in the deep freeze, and I took some of those for our tea. I wanted to make a good start on my exam revision in the evening. Dad wasn’t good at the end of the day, however: that was something I had to learn. He woke up when the sausage rolls and potato-topped miniature mince pies were heating, and bowled the pinot noir bottle with a random sweep of his arm. While I tried to get the stain out of the carpet before it set, Dad began with anxious interrogation. What time was it? Where was his family? Who was I? Who was he? Why hadn’t he been asked to sign off the general accounts? When was his left leg to be amputated?

‘I didn’t know you’re going to have a leg off,’ I said.

‘Who in their right mind would put up with it twitching all the time? The doctor said better to do it at home so that the Inland Revenue and the benefit people don’t know. They reduce superannuation payment limb by limb the bastards.’

‘Okay.’

I put the plate of savouries between us to cool, but Dad had lost awareness of such mundane things, and bit into a very hot roll, spat it out and cried out in anger and pain. It was an oddly childish error and childish reaction.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘You’re stupid,’ he said. ‘Who are you anyway? I thought you were going to spray the roof and then piss off. Why don’t you go now.’ With tears still shining in the nooks and folds of his old face, he began to finger other savouries with a fearful interest. ‘What’s in these anyway?’

‘Sausage, egg and bacon, mince — things like that.’

‘That’s all right then,’ Dad said. ‘You need something to put lead in your pencil, not all lettuce leaves and bloody bran. You can’t do a day’s work on rabbit food.’

‘Eat these up then,’ I said, and he did, enjoying the flavour once they’d cooled a bit.

But after tea it was still broad daylight at that time of year, and how could you expect a grown man to go to bed. Dad couldn’t concentrate on the television, yet was absorbed for almost an hour arranging the loose armrest covers on his armchair. ‘Where did you say we are?’ he asked finally when he’d lost both sleeves down the squab sides.

‘At your place.’

‘This rat hole doesn’t ring a bell with me,’ he said in a voice worn with age, a husky echo like a mournful wind in lakeside reeds.

‘Well, it’s your daughter’s place then, and she looks after you here. It’s good to have family for support, don’t you reckon.’

Dad drooped his lower lip in silent derision, almost fell asleep, then looked across at me for a time. ‘Where do you fit in again?’

‘I’m a sort of cousin, on the other side of the family,’ I told him.

‘I thought you said you’re going to spray something.’

‘Yeah, that too,’ I said.

‘Most things could do with a good spray.’

In the summer twilight, almost nine o’clock, I guided Dad to his bedroom, and left the curtains open so that he could see over the golf course. There were just three boys feeling with their feet for balls in the pond, and the blue-grey dusk softened their distant outlines. I put Dad’s pyjamas beside him on the bed and gave him privacy so that he could undress, but when I went back, he was still sitting there and had taken off just one shoe, which he was holding to his nose like a wine glass. ‘These aren’t my shoes,’ he whispered. ‘Not by a long bloody chalk they’re not, and I’m hungry, I haven’t had anything to eat. If you don’t eat you don’t shit and if you don’t shit you die.’

‘What about all the savouries and cheese? What about the wine before you clobbered the bottle?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean you’ve had your tea.’

‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

I got Dad a piece of white bread and honey, and gradually got his clothes off as he passed it from hand to hand. He had a jersey, shirt and singlet on despite summer, and his bones were the only strong lines on his white body. ‘There’ll be someone in the house tonight, won’t there?’ he said.

The whole business of getting him off to bed took much longer than I’d thought, and I didn’t try to get any swot done after all. I told myself that I’d have a routine for the three days. After watching triceratops and brachiosaurus shaking the earth for half an hour, I switched off the TV and went to the bedroom Angeline had assigned me, which doubled as her husband’s study. The bed was more a settee, and little further than nose distance from the grunty desktop PC and inkjet colour printer. Most of the books were about structural engineering: titles like Ferro Concrete and Earth Tremors, Stress Coefficients in Angular Steel and The Place of Design in Practical Construction. There were a few rugby books, with the photograph pages sticking out slightly from the remainder of the text.

I fell asleep with my face in the eerie green glow of a digital clock, close enough to swallow. A dream of monsters possessed me utterly until a utahraptor reared up and cried, ‘I need to shit. Why has this bloody place no lavatory? Rats, rats everywhere, but no lavatory.’ The incongruity, and perhaps the scale of consequence, woke me suddenly, and the kiwifruit clock numerals showed almost 3 a.m. Old Mr Ladd swayed in the doorway, half hobbled by his falling pyjama trousers. ‘Too late, too late,’ he mourned in his stage whisper, and sobbed as he let loose on the floor.

For just a moment I imagined that if I closed my eyes I could return to the lesser terrors of giant carnivores, but the reek of reality was too strong for that. Whatever Angeline was paying me it wasn’t enough. I tried to persuade Dad to stay put in the doorway so at least there would be only one clean-up site, but he wandered, desolate and tearful, soiling all as he went. Corralled in the bathroom at last, he reluctantly stepped into the shower, but there somewhat recovered his spirits in warmth and steam.

‘Who are you again?’ he asked.

‘I’m your man Friday,’ I said. ‘I’m your minder while Angeline’s away.’

‘She was a wonderful kid, so affectionate. She and my wife were like sisters, and often when I came home from work I’d hear them laughing even as I got out of the car.’

I was almost in the shower with him, reaching through the doorway to make sure he was cleaned up. A situation of intense physical familiarity and yet we were complete strangers. It was easier, though, because I knew that soon he would have quite forgotten his recent humiliation, while his daughter’s affection endured in his memory. And she would be a wonderful kid, a glowing and retrospective emblem, no matter how cursory her later regard had become.

In new pyjamas, Dad went obediently to bed, but not to silence. As I cleaned up in the hall and bathroom, he talked on and on about his life in a time before I was born. Awareness of a listener, rather than a partner in conversation, seemed to be his need. ‘Are you there?’ he’d call from time to time, and a word in reply, or a bang on the plastic bucket, was enough for him to continue. He told me that Angeline had always made his birthday cake after she was eight, that his son, Theo, could have been a world beater in gymnastics if he’d stuck at it.

‘Good, was he?’ I said, after partly opening the bathroom window and coming to his doorway. ‘Where is he now?’ It was out before I remembered my landlady telling me that Angeline’s brother had died overseas.

Dad didn’t reply for a time. His head and shoulders were darker shadows against the bed end. Then, ‘You’ll be old yourself in time,’ he said. ‘See how you like it when your turn comes I say. How would you like to go without food for days?’

‘We’ve had plenty to eat, though.’

‘Useless prick,’ Dad said emphatically.

Half an hour later he was snoring and the smell of shit was growing fainter throughout the house. I weighed up whether I should ring the stand-in doctor the next day and say there was no way I could cope with the old guy. In the few hours sleep that followed, I had another dream: not about dinosaurs, but gymnasts. A whole flock of them performing at once very high on wires, bars and trapeze. All men with cut-away singlets, and superb musculature. All wheeling and spinning and leaping without effort, and all with Dad’s head on their young bodies like a lugubrious mask. I could hear the smack of taut equipment, and see the faint drift of chalk from their palms as they prepared for each exercise. Maybe that’s how Theo passed the time since his death.

No wonder I slept in. Dad was humming ballads as I made sense of my surroundings. ‘Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley’ was the only one I recognised. My own father sang it sometimes.

‘Who are you again?’ Dad asked me when I was helping him with his underpants. He was at his best in the mornings.

‘I’m your helper.’

‘Helper?’

‘And maybe I’ll spray the roof,’ I said.

Dad seemed pleased with something familiar in that. ‘Just so,’ he said with hollow, echoing satisfaction.

After the grotesque pantomime of the night, the sunlit Canterbury morning promised a conventional sanity. Dad ate toast with ginger marmalade and discoursed on factory management, taking me for a member of his team. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘it’s not important now whether I know anything about engineering at all. It’s leadership and man-management skills that are important to run a company. It’s a truth that seems to have to be discovered over and over again. People think the best chemist should run the pharmaceutical company, and the top academic head the university. In fact it’s all about motivation and team building.’

‘Isn’t that American touchy-feely bullshit?’ I said. If Dad Ladd was up to coherent discussion in the mornings then why not have intellectual stringency.

‘I thought so myself at first, but it’s their palaver that’s false, not the premise. Take this deal at the moment with the stainless steel casings for Hentlings.’ But Dad’s voice then lost resolve, as he realised there was some discontinuity between the Hentlings contract and his Monday morning breakfast with a stranger. Bewildered pride stopped him saying more, and he concentrated on his coffee, his head cantilevered far over the table. In the afternoons and evenings when Dad was well away I played anarchic fool to his Lear without scruple, but in the mornings, when he regained something of his original self, I was just an imposter and voyeur, and a sad discomfort was often the tone.

Dad then gazed out across the golf course, his great, loose eyes sliding glances at me when he thought he was unobserved. Defensiveness is a ploy of age, as the mind itself proves unreliable. ‘I’m here to keep you company while your daughter’s away for a few days,’ I said, to spare him the indignity of yet another inquiry as to where he was in the world and with whom.

He nodded firmly, as if he’d been sure of that all along. ‘It’s good weather here at this time of year,’ he said.

I hung out Dad’s pyjama bottoms on the line, aware that more articles would have disguised his little accident, but then realised that he had no recollection of such recent things. Some afflictions ameliorate their own effects. A whole day with Dad stretched ahead. For a time I encouraged him to talk more of his management practices and attitudes, but he grew impatient with the lack of sophistication in my questions, and after explaining the professional development system he’d instituted to identify management potential, he fell silent and ignored further promptings.

There was no way I could stand being housebound for three days, and I decided if Dad couldn’t be left alone, then he’d have to come with me. I asked him if he played squash and although his answer was noncommittal, I told him that he was bound to enjoy watching anyway. ‘We can get a break out of the house,’ I said cheerfully, in that positive, sweepalong way that works sometimes with kids. Dad gave a lopsided grin. I rang Martin and told him to meet me there.

I wasn’t entirely irresponsible. I put the one helmet on Dad, and even though the sun glittered in the blue, summer sky and the breeze across the golf course was warm to the touch, I buttoned him into his ankle-length, dark, Jack the Ripper coat, and encouraged him to climb onto the Suzuki behind me. The squash bag I held between my thighs and rested on the handlebars. ‘Hang on tight, and lean in when I do,’ I told him. He did hold on, and as the little bike screamed its way to the squash club, I was aware of Dad’s long face at my left shoulder. Did he wonder how it had come to this? A man who had been general manager of an engineering firm employing two hundred and seventy people, trapped on the back of a 125cc Suzuki driven by a stranger who had come perhaps to spray the roof for mildew.

‘Sit here,’ I told him at the club, and folded his coat to pad the wood of the tiered seating looking down on the court. As Martin and I played, I checked every now and again that Dad was still there. ‘Are you okay, Mr Ladd?’ and at least once he nodded. A mishit sent the ball into the seating, and despite there being nowhere for it to be lost, we couldn’t find it anywhere. I shook Dad’s greatcoat and felt the pockets several times, I even patted him down like a policeman searching for weapons. He took it all with equanimity.

‘Weird,’ said Martin. ‘Maybe he’s swallowed it.’ I wished he hadn’t said that, for a squash ball is pretty small, but Dad seemed to be breathing okay and in no discomfort.

‘It’s not warm here at all, is it,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if there might be a nice piece of pork for lunch.’

Martin and I played two more games, then I took Dad to the lavatory and togged him up for the trip home. ‘Been nice to meet you,’ said Martin, whose mother had lots of visitors to the house and was up on manners. I expected Dad to ask who he was again, but he wasn’t always predictable and it was still morning. ‘Likewise,’ he said and compressed his bushy eyebrows in a smile.

Little conversation is possible on a motorbike, unless you shout, but when I stopped at the Ilam Road lights, I could just hear in my left ear Dad humming one of his ballads. It reassured me that riding as pillion passenger had no terrors for him, and that a squash ball wasn’t lodged in his windpipe. He was no quick mover any more, but once he got a grip such as that around my waist he held on well.

Dad didn’t get any pork for lunch, but I did some cheese on toast, and we sat on the patio. Despite the heat he kept his long coat on, and it didn’t worry me. I wanted to insist on having my own way only in issues that mattered. Why shouldn’t he sit with a winter coat in the summer sun if he enjoyed it? ‘It’s a class coat that,’ I said.

‘I had one like it in the battalion.’

‘You were in the war then,’ I said.

‘Everyone was in the war,’ said Dad in the voice Brando used for the Godfather. It was something else I saw no reason to contradict him on. There’s all sorts of war, after all. He fell asleep suddenly quite soon afterwards. One moment he was puckering his lips and running a finger on his unshaven neck, the next his head was back on the chair and his nose was casting a shadow like a sundial marker.

For an hour and a half I was able to concentrate on the constitutional effects of the American Civil War. No question came up on that, of course. I had a beer on the quiet too. It seemed to me that I was entitled to keep a little ahead of Dad in regard to alcohol.

Mid-afternoon Dad woke. I looked up from my books to see that he was observing me quizzically. His mouth had fallen open and the sun caught the white stubble on his neck. I knew what he was thinking. ‘Who am I again?’ I said. ‘I’m Brian who’s looking after you. Okay?’ He nodded with a certain nonchalance to suggest he knew that, then he worked hard at generating a cough strong enough to shift the phlegm accumulated during his sleep. ‘Did you enjoy it at the squash courts this morning?’

‘Squash?’

‘This morning we went down on the bike to the squash courts. Remember?’

‘Ah,’ said Dad in a guarded and equivocal way. I thought that as he’d forgotten it already I could take him there each morning and it would be a fresh experience each time.

We had a mug of tea, and then I found his triple head shaver at the bottom of his wardrobe and gave him a shave. He quite enjoyed it, moving his head about to tauten the skin at my direction and closing his eyes in the direct sunlight. It had been some time since anyone had taken any care in giving Dad a shave. Long hairs, missed day after day, lay in fold lines of his skin and his upper lip had been neglected. ‘I use a cut-throat most times,’ said Dad, but that must have been years ago, for there were plenty of moles and blemishes which would have come to a bloody end. I noticed that the skin over his collarbone was very pale, and the fine creases formed small diamond patterns. The tip of his left ear was eaten away slightly by a scaly skin cancer. His cheekbones were pronounced rims beneath his eyes. It was a ravaged face, but strong nevertheless. Dad ran his hand over his features with satisfaction, and two white butterflies tumbled in a courtship dance through the warm air inches from his head. ‘You look a new man,’ I said.

‘I’ve got very stiff, you know.’ He tested his arms by stretching them out, then lifting them above his head slowly. ‘You do get stiff with age,’ he said. ‘Nothing to be done about that. I suppose I’d better be heading home soon.’

‘No hurry while it’s so warm,’ I said. ‘Enjoy watching the golfers for a while, then we’ll think about things again.’

I did a bit more on the Civil War, but just being aware that Dad was awake made it difficult to concentrate. Even sitting and at rest, the business of living necessitated a range of noises: exhalation was accompanied by a small wheeze, he smacked his lips from time to time, and gave the occasional shuddering and dolorous sigh. And every now and again one of his slightly curled hands flipped suddenly and was still again.

As the sun slipped and the shadows grew from the golf course pines, I began to wonder about Dad and me in the coming night. Maybe the motorbike ride would help him sleep; maybe more physical exertion would help as well. ‘How about a walk before tea, Mr Ladd?’

‘Eh?’

‘We could stretch our legs before tea.’

‘Stretch your own legs. Who are you again?’

But with the false, importunate bonhomie that comes so naturally to a carer, I hauled Dad up, gave him his stick and encouraged him off the patio and down the drive. His resistance was expressed by turning a little away from me as we walked and stopping often to explore with his stick any plants to the side.

We began the small, seemingly never-ending block, and I disliked myself for the hope I had that no acquaintance would see me out walking with the old guy, yet maintained that hope just the same. It wasn’t a trendy way to spend time on a summer afternoon, especially as he still wore his heavy coat in the last glare of the sun. Dad would stop from time to time to have a good cough, or peer into people’s properties if he noticed movement. Self-consciousness is lost with the passing of years. A woman was kneeling on a groundsheet near her letter box to do some weeding, and after watching with interest for some time, Dad turned away, saying in his hollow but penetrating way, ‘Women get big arses later in their life, don’t you think, Warren?’

‘Who’s Warren?’ I said, urging him roughly on down the street, but without the courage to turn round.

‘What’s that?’

‘Who’s Warren?’ But Dad just gave his slow, soft smile. Whoever Warren was, and what brief neurological flash had linked him to our day together, was gone for the moment.

When we’d done the circuit and arrived home again, Dad was down to a shuffle. He was interested and somewhat sceptical to be told that was the house he lived in. He had entered that late afternoon free-fall from connectedness which I came to know well. And the fall was into the whirling chaos of each night. ‘I’d never buy a house like this,’ he said derisively. He was a little ahead of me, and he looked back with his head hung low and the whites of his eyes showing, the way a horse sometimes looks back around its flank.

‘It’s Angeline’s house, and you live with her.’ Even in late afternoon his daughter’s name struck a chord somewhere, and he didn’t contradict me, but came with some reluctance towards the front door.

‘And you are again?’

‘I’m Warren.’ I admit my intention was investigative, a hope that in denial he might reveal this Warren, but Dad’s malady was too subtle for my amateur psychology. ‘You still haven’t sprayed for mildew,’ was all he said.

I closed the big glass doors to the patio, but pushed Dad’s padded lounge chair close to them so that he was full on to the setting sun. Such comfort activated his appetites. ‘Wine and cheese would be very acceptable,’ he stage whispered. So I took another red from the cupboard beneath the stairs, but, learning from experience, used a mug for Dad, and kept the bottle well away.

Dad sank so far back into the easy chair that it looked as if some sort of suction was at work, and the sun through the glass on his gunslinger coat must have put his temperature well up, but his face remained pale and he gargled happily in his mug. ‘I thought I might cook bangers and mash for tea,’ I said. In my second year, when I’d been flatting, it had been my stand-by when rostered for a meal. For visitors my variation was to make a packet gravy and have peas as well. I’d received compliments, not all sarcastic.

‘The Germans make a good sausage,’ said Dad. ‘Here the sausage is a poor man’s food, but in Europe they know how to make a sausage, and how to treat it.’

‘I thought you hated the Germans. The war and all that.’

‘The war. I’m not talking about the war. Who said anything about the war. I thought you said something about sausage.’

‘You’re right,’ I said.

‘In the war the food was bloody awful.’

‘Mine will be better,’ I said.

‘War is never better,’ said Dad huskily. He looked at me rather belligerently from the depths of the chair, but when I topped up his wine mug his expression softened.

I moved to another topic. ‘I wonder how Angeline is enjoying her holiday.’

‘She always keeps in touch, always has. Not like some,’ said Dad. ‘We hardly hear from Theo. What sort of job does she do now?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘It’s something to do with work. Some sort of work, I know that.’

‘Right.’

I made a good fist of dinner, though I couldn’t find any packet gravy. However Dad sank into one of his repetitive spells, and after asking me over and over who I was again, he began complaining that rats were gnawing at him during the nights. ‘I don’t want to sleep in the rat room again tonight,’ he said.

‘I don’t think there are any rats here,’ I said.

‘No one can sleep with rats at you all night. The buggers come out of the wardrobe, I reckon.’

‘Let’s close the wardrobe door then tonight.’

‘Oh, they bite to buggery, those buggers.’ Dad pushed the coat sleeve up a bit and displayed his pale, waxy skin. ‘What’s that then,’ he said. ‘Scotch mist?’ There were no bites that I could see, but that didn’t mean Dad hadn’t suffered: pain can be the consequence of belief.

‘No one likes a rat,’ I agreed.

‘I don’t want to sleep in the rat room tonight.’

‘No one likes a rat.’ Dementia’s repetition is so easy to fall into.

I did the dishes while Dad in the lounge railed against the rats, and then I watched a Mafia movie on television with the sound well up. It was hopeless to try and swot while Dad went on. He had dried up by the time the film was over, just nodding to himself and giving the occasional knowing chuckle, which fluttered in his open mouth. There is a cocoon of self-absorption that surrounds the very old and the very young.

For this second night I was determined to be better prepared, and I cajoled Dad into a lavatory visit before he went to bed. Getting the big coat off him was a bit of a test: his affection for it had increased during the day. ‘But I’d better have it ready for when I go,’ he said testily.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Back to my own place.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Same place it’s always been.’

‘But you won’t be leaving during the night.’

‘What would you know,’ said Dad. I reminded him to wipe himself and flush the bowl, then showed him the way to his bedroom.

‘Why are these rooms always in different places?’ he said.

‘All part of the grand puzzle of life,’ I told him.

‘I think you’re going mad,’ he whispered.

Once Dad was tucked up I tried to do more swot, but after the night before I was apprehensive of interruption later in the night, so went to bed at eleven myself. So as not to face the vivid envy of the digital clock face, I lay on my back. Technology was at first a distraction there as well, for on the ceiling was a smoke alarm like a pig’s snout, and it cheeped softly to warn that the battery was low. The regular, subdued insistence became finally a lullaby and I fell into a routine anxiety dream of academic failure.

Dad’s cries of despair woke me. Piercing, vehement cries, utterly distinct from the echo chamber hoarseness of his everyday voice. ‘The rats are here again, the buggers,’ he called, and when I went in and put on the light, he was sitting forlornly on his bed with his big hands clasped. He must have been out earlier in the night because he had piled some books against the wardrobe door, and had a maroon blazer on, but no pyjama top. ‘Rats are king here,’ he said accusingly. Tears glittered on his face. ‘Where are my wife and family? Where is my life?’

‘Where are the rats?’ I asked to appease him. His other questions were too tough for me, and called for a divine answer. ‘They’ve all buggered off,’ I said. I pushed books away from the wardrobe and opened the door. ‘See. Nothing to worry about.’

Dad didn’t answer, but his expression showed he thought my display was mere naivety, and that he and the rats knew a thing or two.

‘What is this place?’ he said finally.

‘It’s your daughter’s place. You live here.’

‘How can it be Angeline’s place when she lives with us? She’s still at school, so how can she have a place? Why doesn’t anyone tell the truth any more? The world’s full of liars now. I tell my staff that deceit is the worst failing, and self-deceit the worst of all.’

I thought Dad was bound to query my appearance in his life, but in that night no doubt I was just one more enigma in a pageant of glaring inconsistency. He sat morosely for a time, breathing heavily, as if defeated in one round and having little hope of the next. He looked at the skirting board in front of him with a dull obstinacy. ‘I’ll get back to my home and family,’ he said, ‘rats or no rats. You don’t know as much as you think you do.’

‘You’re right there,’ I said, with exams in mind.

I got him to lie down again, and didn’t bother hassling him about the blazer, or the reason for his wish to leave the light on. I’m sure Dad was a believer in priorities when he was a captain of industry. For me it seemed the way to go in aged care. Food, booze, warmth, light and rats were all important things; what you wore in bed, or said to passing acquaintances, was of little account.

‘Leave the light on for the migration of the monarchs,’ he said with some dignity. I thought he meant butterflies rather than crowned heads, but the connection to either was obscure.

‘Where are they headed?’

‘Rings of Saturn,’ said Dad with soft assurance.

‘Of course.’

I stood on the patio for a while, which was dimly illuminated by the light through Dad’s curtains. I could hear him humming to himself in an almost cheerful way, and the golf course across the road was a dark gap bounded by lights of streets and houses. I wondered by what random happenstance old Mr Ladd and I should end up there together, and what small connection it might be with future oddity in which both of us were absent. Maybe his long, dark coat would clothe a jazz musician of the house in time; maybe he’d written a sonnet of censure in regard to rats and folded it in some crevice of the wardrobe from which a buck-toothed child of immigrants would draw it out. Perhaps our tangential conversations would lodge in the Pink Batts, and flap down again decades after into some other verbal banquet of senility.

Dad was asleep when I went back in. The blazer was open and the hair of his chest thick, but almost colourless. I pulled up the sheet, turned out the light, and shook a fist at the wardrobe as a warning to the rats not to start anything. Groggy with bewilderment and fatigue, I lay down on my own bed, pulled my scrotum free from my thighs, and was comfortable. To green numerals and a chirping smoke alarm I was oblivious. Sleep closed on me like the grave.

When I opened my eyes next morning, the clock at the end of my nose showed well after eight o’clock. I spent several minutes working out what was the day of the week, and was amazed that it was only Tuesday. Surely I had been responsible for Dad a week or more. I wondered whether in extreme old age time itself slowed, along with the other functions of life, and if that perception was contagious. To what extent could time drag its feet before halting altogether?

Metaphysics gave place to action when I heard Dad wandering the rooms in search of the lavatory. It lay, of course, behind the one door he hadn’t thought to try. ‘Hard luck,’ I said.

‘Bloody place.’ He still wore the sports blazer, and his pyjama trousers were wet, but nothing worse had happened. There’d be sheets to wash as well, I reminded myself. He voided with sound like a dredge emptying, and the smell billowed through the house in almost visual intensity. Dad gave a long sigh of relief. It wasn’t a bad start to the day. ‘Who are you again?’ he asked as I helped him dress.

‘I am the Panjanmandarin of the Empire of the Rats.’

‘No need to get shirty,’ said Dad.

‘Remember the rats from last night?’

‘What rats?’ he said, scornful in the comparative logic of morning.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘let’s have breakfast.’

‘What’s the chance of an egg?’ he asked.

After breakfast Dad started to get ready for work, but I told him that he’d retired years ago, and he agreed and went out to his favourite place on the patio in the morning sun. I took my notes on the poetry of Herrick and joined him. Already there was a ladies’ foursome on the fairway closest to us. Their laughter just carried the distance.

‘Do you like women?’ asked Dad in his soughing voice, and his lantern face hung in their direction. I said that as a generalisation I was in agreement.

‘There weren’t many women in the war.’

‘No.’

‘Women underestimate their anatomical measurements and men exaggerate theirs. That’s something I’ve noticed is a difference.’

I was surprised by Dad’s perception, even though it was morning. Every now and again the clouds cleared and the original sharp landscape of Dad’s mind was revealed.

‘What else do you reckon about women?’

‘They’re much more reliable as workers,’ he said. ‘It was my policy to hire women if the jobs were suitable.’ Dad enjoyed the sun: kept his face to it even as its summer intensity grew. He had an almost reptilian instinct for heat. Two or three minutes later what he took as a new thought occurred to him. ‘There weren’t many women in the war,’ he said.

‘So you said.’

‘Did I?’

Throughout the morning I got a little revision done. The high points of our interaction were a couple of trips to the toilet and a shave. The lavatory visits were as laborious as ever, but the shave took a good deal less time than the day before, because we’d done such a good job then. Dad did have another intellectual crescendo, about cars, when we were having a cup of coffee. ‘What sort of car do you drive, Warren?’ he said. So Warren was with us briefly again.

‘I’ve got a motorbike.’

‘One thing that I allow myself in business is a decent car. It gives clients confidence in the firm, but also there’s pleasure in the possession of it. Not something posey — no turbo nonsense, or fruit salad colours. A quality six-cylinder three-litre saloon, say, and I prefer manuals. I’ve never taken to automatics the same.’

‘What have you got now?’ I asked, knowing he hadn’t driven for years.

‘A Saab, but I’m not sure where it’s kept. Since I’ve been staying with you here, I’m not sure where it’s kept. If you could find out we could take a spin to Feilding, or Taupo. I used to have to drive a fair bit on business and enjoyed it. A long trip on a good road without much traffic, and everything in the car ticking over nicely and the world slipping by without being able to get a grip on you.’ Dad’s voice was quiet and he was restful in the sun. I imagined him as a busy manager, having a few hours to himself in his company car as he went from one city to another. And not knowing in those rather pleasant interludes that a time would come without any pressure of work at all, without a car, sometimes without a memory.

‘Which was the best car you ever had?’ I asked him, as a test.

‘I had a V8 CustomLine which was a damn good car.’

‘What were CustomLines?’

‘The big Fords,’ said Dad. ‘I bought it new and she did over a hundred and fifty thousand miles without missing a beat.’ I could see that the recollection of that car was of considerable satisfaction to him: his wrecked face had a half-smile and his hands were at ease in his lap. Maybe he was thinking of the sheen on the CustomLine when he’d just polished it, the burble of the V8 when he fed it the fat, times on holiday with Viv, Angeline and Theo all close to him. Maybe he was rather caught by some glimpse of himself, lithe and on his way up in business.

I opened a tin of sheep’s tongues and we had sandwiches for lunch. It was the sort of meat that Dad managed well and it suited summer. I brought out a few lettuce leaves too, but neither of us was great on salad. Small tasks require a good deal of application at Dad’s age. Just to get the sandwich to his mouth without losing the tongue filling was for him a task requiring not just tactical hand movements, but a full strategy.

‘Would you like to go down to the squash courts again this afternoon?’ I asked, but of course yesterday was further from Dad’s recall than the Ford CustomLine of history, even at midday.

‘Eh?’

‘You could watch me play squash, Mr Ladd.’

‘Could I,’ he said, amiable and uncomprehending.

Martin was keen enough to have a break from study, so I dressed Dad in his full-length Wichita coat again, and left him standing dark and incongruous in the bright sun while I brought round the Suzuki. ‘Is it time to go?’ he asked as I put his helmet on.

‘Into the sunset, pilgrim.’

‘It’s not sunset yet,’ said Dad as, twisting round, I helped him find first the left footrest, then the right. Through the summer streets we went, and the guilt I felt was not for any danger that the old guy faced, but for history and literature neglected.

Despite his visit on the day before, Dad saw everything at the courts afresh: the glass court back and the upper seating, the changing rooms with coffin lockers. He was introduced anew to Martin and found inaugural pleasure in it all. ‘You didn’t hide the ball yesterday, or swallow it?’ asked Martin, but Dad just gave his most quizzical smile to disguise incomprehension. He sat on the top seating for a while, and I forgot him in the concentration on the game, until after losing a close set I looked up and realised he had gone. He wasn’t anywhere I looked inside the building, but when I went from the main doors into the carpark, he was sitting on the small concrete wall, his eyes closed in the sun, singing softly to himself.

‘I wondered where you’d got to,’ I said.

Dad opened his eyes and fell silent. He squinted at me without giving anything away. ‘I’m waiting for my wife to pick me up,’ he said formally.

‘I’m taking you home.’

‘Who are you again?’

‘Brian. I’m looking after you while Angeline’s away.’

‘Angeline’s away? No one told me that.’

‘I’ll just get my gear and we’ll be off,’ I told him. Martin was a bit disappointed we didn’t get another few games, but was okay about it. He knew it was a job for me, and thought looking after a very old guy was easy money. I’d started with that idea myself.

On the way back Dad didn’t seem so good on the pillion as on the way down, or during the rides the day before. He wasn’t hanging on as well, and didn’t lean in on the corners. I cut down the speed, and shouted to him to keep a good grip. How would I explain to Angeline if he fell off, or had a seizure of some sort. I made a small, one-sided contract with God that if we got home safely I wouldn’t take Dad on the bike again. His left foot did come off the rest and drag on the road, but by then I was down to jogging pace and able to stop before Dad was swung off. He didn’t complain, but his increasing bewilderment made me feel all the more guilty, and I was again surprised at how quickly he could change from competence to ineptitude. I apologised to him when we were home, but he had lost the sequence of cause and consequence.

He wouldn’t take the coat off, and sat on the patio rubbing his left leg. I gave him a mug of sweet tea, and started on some notes about the Wakefield influence on New Zealand settlement. I hoped the heat of the late afternoon sun, redoubled by the greatcoat, would lull him to sleep for a few hours, but he showed increasing bad humour and fearfulness. He complained about his sore leg, though unable to remember the cause. He complained about being left with a stranger in a house he didn’t much like. ‘I won’t have to spend the night here, will I?’ or ‘I’m not going to be here when it gets dark am I?’ he asked a hundred times, but paid no attention to any of the placating replies I made. I ignored him in the end. Angeline said he’d been a top administrator, but in the bad times all that was left of that serene and calculating efficiency was a querulous anxiety. ‘It’s a very cold house at night, this,’ he said morosely. ‘Who are you again?’

‘An academic failure in Gotham City,’ I said.

‘You talk nonsense,’ said Dad. His low-slung face turned away from me and he continued the conversation with himself. ‘I’m certain we said there was to be underfloor heating right through the living area and the bedrooms. It’ll be the rats, the buggers, that have chewed all the wiring. It happens all over the world at night. After the war there was nothing to stop rats spreading at all. In the desert I could always hear them breeding in the night.’ Dad peered into the bright sun as if it were blackness over the shifting sand, and cracked his knuckles. The hollow whisper of his voice seemed to be coming from a barren place deep inside.

It was going to be a bad evening. With the exams looming I was desperate to get a decent night’s work done. When Dad came out with the predictable request for wine and cheese, I took it as a sign and decided to let him drink enough to enter some Valhalla to which war and rats could not accompany him. For the first time I made a serious inventory of the grog cupboard and found, behind a carton, a bottle of Napoleon brandy which I’m sure Angeline and her husband had forgotten. I brought out also a bottle of shiraz to soften Dad up and provide a glass or two for me. We started on the patio and when the sun had gone down moved into the lounge. We had a mince pie each before I introduced Dad to the brandy. ‘Are the others going to have a glass?’ he said, all good humour by that time.

‘The world has our invitation,’ I said.

‘Include the orchestra in that.’

‘Even the celestial choirs,’ I said.

‘We’ll all be at the start line by 0500 hours,’ said Dad.

‘Amen to that,’ I said.

‘Amen.’

For a couple of hours the wine and brandy loosened Dad’s tongue and he hummed tunes and talked of his family as if his son and daughter were still children, as if his wife were still alive. Perhaps those years had been the uplands of his life. But then he sagged in his chair, steadily sipped brandy and made small noises with his loose lips. Twice I stopped studying to take him for a leak, and he went meekly, allowing me the first time to get possession of the gunslinger’s coat, and lifting his arms without expressing indignity when I worked his zip. I think he would have kept drinking brandy as long as I continued to pour it, but when the bottle was almost empty and the time was after eleven, I put his arm over my shoulder and helped him into his bedroom. It’s not easy undressing a very old, drunk man. Dad was all inconvenient elbows, and limp yet recalcitrant feet and hands like dying flatfish. When he was sitting on the bed and I was tugging his pyjama jacket on, he came out with a whispered echo of a conversation long gone. ‘There weren’t many women in the war.’

‘Not many here either,’ I said.

‘There was one nurse.’ Dad’s voice had almost disappeared.

‘Good on you,’ I said.

‘Very few women in the war in fact,’ and as if this was her cue, Angeline rang from Nelson.

‘So how’s Dad?’ she asked. I told her that he was fine and that he’d just gone off to bed. ‘Everything okay then?’ Everything was fine I said, and mentioned that he seemed brighter and more active in the mornings. ‘Yes, that’s the way of it,’ she said. ‘You’re not leaving him alone at all, are you?’ I could reply quite truthfully on that, but not to the next rapid interrogation. ‘You’re making sure he’s taking both sets of tablets, green and pink?’ I told her there were no problems there, and made a mental note to find the pill bottles and chuck out the number Dad should have taken. I riposted with a question of my own about the undoubted pleasure of her holiday. ‘Yes, it’s been quite nice, thank you, but I’m sure we haven’t had a chance to unwind properly yet.’ There was something in her tone which made me think she thought my inquiry overfamiliar. ‘Well anyway,’ she said, ‘do your best until the day after tomorrow and I’ll see you then. Don’t take too much notice of stuff Dad says at nights. He gets a bit wandery when he’s tired.’ I told her I thought he’d sleep pretty soundly.

He certainly did that. I checked on him a couple of times before going to bed myself. He could have been dead except for the snoring, and hadn’t moved an inch since I put the blankets over him. The snoring was reassuring because at the back of my mind was a fear that he might die in the night, and the post mortem show an exceedingly high blood alcohol level. I took the brandy bottle across the road and flung it into the soft darkness of the golf course, and then, in the exaggerated anxiety that comes late at night, worried about the fingerprints that would be clear upon it. The guilt I felt in drugging the old guy in that way more than undid the scholastic peace that had been my motivation, and eventually I went to sleep with my mind wiped of any revision, and a decision that for the rest of my wardenship I would allow Dad the natural expression of his age, his condition and his metamorphosis of character. At least alcohol had dealt to the rats of dementia, and a deep barking dog was the one animal to inhabit the night.

The only obvious consequence of the binge in the morning was a monumentally soiled bed — a soon forgotten indignity for Dad, and a rightful punishment for me. ‘Why is there always a terrible pong in this house?’ Dad asked when I had finished getting the worst off the sheets in the tub and then put them in the machine. He showed no signs of a hangover and waited with some impatience for his breakfast.

‘I’m going to give the place an airing today,’ I said humbly. He was alive and I was so thankful: my vision of the night which saw him stretched out dead drunk in the most literal way was still fresh. ‘Tomorrow Angeline comes home and everything needs to be in order. Where are these pills you should be taking anyway?’

‘You don’t get rid of a stink like this with pills,’ said Dad scathingly.

For the first time since I’d been looking after Dad, there wasn’t a clear sky. It was still warm, but a high sheet of pale cloud hid the sun. The patio wasn’t as attractive without the direct strike of the sun, and after breakfast we stayed in the lounge. Dad was quiet as I shaved him, tilting his head on command and enjoying the busy feel of the electric razor on his skin, but when that was done he wanted to talk about going back to his own home and family. ‘I could rent this place out,’ he said. ‘Investment properties like this can be good little earners if you’re not facing on-going maintenance.’

‘Angeline’s living here though.’

There was a pause. In the mornings Dad had the ability to process some of the things he heard and to notice inconsistencies with his own sense of earlier life. ‘How old’s Angeline now?’ he said cautiously.

‘In her forties,’ I said, with greater conviction than I felt.

‘So she lives here all the time?’

‘With you.’ I avoided the complication of her husband. Dad nodded, as if he’d known these things all along, his head swaying like that of a Chinese processional dragon. He made a steeple of his big, wrinkled hands, a typical gesture, and his eyes slid behind their sagging lower lids. He was doing his best with some question to himself, but couldn’t make anything of it.

‘And you are again?’ he enquired, almost apologetically.

While I read through my notes on a revisionist history of the New Zealand wars of the nineteenth century, Dad was content to hum and sing to himself while playing with a thread from the band of his thick, blue jersey, but after I went out to collect the mail I found that he had a box of documents on his knee, and he became intent on a scrutiny of them. I tried to concentrate on my work, but after an hour or so I found the obvious repetition of his actions distracting. He would take each envelope, or paper, from the box, manoeuvre it before his face for a time then place it on the coffee table beside him. When all were accounted for, he would replace them in the box and begin all over again, giving just as much concentration to a document on its third or fourth appearance as on its first.

‘What have you got there, Mr Ladd?’ I said finally, from comradeship rather than curiosity.

‘I need everything in order before I go back to my wife and family,’ he said.

‘Well, that makes sense.’

‘I don’t seem to be quite on top of things the way I used to be.’ His voice was quiet, more self-aware than usual. The limited admission had greater poignancy than his more flamboyant claims. I left the Maori and the colonial militia, and gave Dad the attention he deserved when at his best.

‘You’re eighty-eight,’ I said, ‘and I suppose everybody’s memory is slipping a bit by then. You’re still pretty good on all the early stuff.’

‘Things seem different somehow. Why is it that I have to spend so much time by myself these days?’

I had no easy answer to that. In Dad’s whirling times I could play a sort of Mad Hatter counterpoint of non sequiturs without belittling him, but when he was in the same world deference to that realisation was due. ‘Your wife passed on some years ago and now you live here with your daughter. She’s on holiday this week and I’m keeping you company. My name’s Brian.’

So much contemporary truth was a shock for Dad. He relaxed back in the chair and his face assumed an added mournfulness. He rubbed the back of each hand in turn and eventually gave a small, wry smile. And there was in his eyes for a moment an ineffable realisation of his own condition. ‘That’s right. Of course, of course,’ he affirmed to himself, ‘Viv had a heart attack and she’s buried at Padleigh. Yes, of course. And this is Angeline’s house.’

But he didn’t show any interest in his daughter’s home. His voice faded, and he looked out to the uniform, pale cloud high in the summer sky. The revelations of comprehension were of no more joy to him than the perils of senility. Maybe as a natural means of escaping both, he fell asleep soon afterwards, and I worked on through the skirmishes of the 1860s. Dad’s mouth hung open and his theatrical, fly-away eyebrows were ludicrously luxuriant. Maybe the wine and brandy from the night before still had some claim on him; might lead him gentle into some good night.

At midday I slipped out of the lounge and assessed Angeline’s pantry with lunch in mind. On the one hand was my wish for ease of preparation, on the other the mercenary consideration that food was a part of my conditions of service. Maybe simplicity at noon and indulgence at the end of the day I decided. Baked beans on toast topped with two poached eggs apiece was the outcome. I was pleased all of the yolks were intact, but when I woke Dad he had no flattering comments. ‘I suppose there’s worse things than beans,’ was all he said. ‘People don’t eat them the same now though, do they. Something to do with roughage, or saturated fats.’

‘You don’t have to force it down,’ I said. I was surprised by the resentment I felt at his criticism. My response gave me an understanding of the greater scale of fury a committed chef would feel if Provençal Braised Pork with Saffron and Truffle Stuffing were disparaged.

‘No, no, it’s okay.’ Dad trailed his knife through the egg yolks. ‘I can get through it.’

Dad was not a malicious person. He said he’d help with the washing up, and managed to find a second tea towel and dry one flat plate before I finished everything else. A long afternoon stretched before us and I wanted to move out of the lounge to give some sense of progression to the day, and also get Dad away from his box of documents. The patio was warm and pleasant though the high cloud still reduced the sun to a general and suffusing glow. A small girl on a small trike did endless, intent circles on the neighbour’s drive, and on the smooth expanse of the golf course people towed their trundlers and had time for unhurried talk. Dad seemed restless until I remembered his long coat and helped him put it on. Incongruity is of no concern in old age: the weight and texture of the coat must have been pleasing to him and he loved the heat.

‘I played a bit of golf myself,’ said Dad. ‘It wasn’t my sport of choice, but in business it’s useful to be able to play golf without making a goat of yourself. Especially in Asian countries, you develop a sense of business opportunity and personal trust by playing together.’

‘So deals are made on the course.’

‘Not so much that, but Japanese and Singaporean businessmen like to get a sense of your personality that way.’

‘Were you any good?’

‘Not really,’ said Dad, ‘but it got me to the table without too much embarrassment and I had good products to sell. Do you know anything about mechanical engineering?’

‘No.’ I thought that was the end of the conversation, because Dad said nothing for a long while and hummed quietly.

‘What is it you do know about?’ he asked finally, and I almost congratulated him on holding onto one line of thought for so long.

‘I’m still at varsity, studying English and History.’

‘You do the roof spraying as a part-time thing then?’

‘That’s it,’ I said. Life was too short to tease out absolutely fact and fiction. The end justifies the means when you’re talking to someone like Dad, and the thing was to keep him as happy as possible it seemed to me. ‘What would you do if you could have your time over again?’ I asked him.

‘Over again?’

‘Would you live your life differently if you had a choice — a different job, different country, stuff like that.’

‘I was always a good organiser.’ Dad seemed quite interested in the self-analysis. ‘My mother and father were muddlers and I reacted against that, I suppose. Logic, systems, the application of reason — that’s what I brought to business. People sneer at administrators because they don’t understand the skills involved.’

‘You did okay, though.’

‘People think it’s paper shuffling, not real work,’ said Dad. He seemed about to say more, but then closed his eyes briefly so I prompted him while he still had a chain of thought.

‘So what is important for a manager?’

‘People not policy. The best systems in the world are useless if you don’t carry your staff. People skills make the difference from the factory floor to the boardroom, that’s what I say.’ And Dad said it with surprising coherence. It was surely the best I saw him in all the time I was there, and gave me a glimpse of the person he had once been. It was perhaps achieved with some effort, however, for afterwards he concentrated on rubbing his hands, and making sly sheep’s eyes at me. ‘So are you in some sort of business?’ he said finally.

‘I’m keeping you company.’

‘Ah, yes, that’s right.’ Dad’s voice had the pretence of assurance, but his soft expression was one of increasing bewilderment as his mind moved from the steady recollection of the far past to the morass of the present. ‘Yes, of course, that’s right, yes,’ he said to comfort himself, looking over to the abandoned trike in the neighbouring section. The child had vanished without us noticing.

Dad leant back and closed his eyes; I returned to my swot notes. No way was I going to risk another squash trip with him on the pillion seat, although I felt stale from lack of physical activity. I was envious of the happy gaggles of golfers who straggled over the well-kept course, and whose laughter carried quite clearly to me. I wondered if any player there ever glanced across at Dad on his patio and had some premonition of their future.

Dad snored for an hour and a half beneath the luminous warm cloud of the summer, and then woke with a good deal of lip-smacking and fidgeting. For another half an hour he hummed and half sang snatches of songs from the forties and fifties, some of which had become popular again. He wasn’t conscious of me during this time and I carried on working while the opportunity was there. Finally his awareness circled out and he became quieter, coughed softly in a slightly self-conscious way and regarded me from beneath the thatch of his eyebrows. I said nothing. I wanted the mood and relationship to be of his making, rather than always imposing reality as I saw it on Dad’s variable world. I made coffee for us both, and settled in my patio chair again, still without a word. It wasn’t a ploy for my entertainment: let Dad kick off, and I’d just run with the ball. Dad began in his own good time.

‘Tell me about your time in Ecuador, Warren,’ said Dad in his reed-bed whisper. So the sun was over the yard arm, or some such thing.

‘It’s mostly forest in Ecuador and very hot. They have a lot of insects and bats, but a very shaky economy.’

‘Any rats?’ asked Dad.

‘No rats. It’s an odd thing, there’s an indigenous tropical lily there and its pollen inhibits the breeding of rats. Ecuador is the only country in the world completely free of rats. They have monkeys with coloured bums, though, and those fish that reduce horses to skeletons in no time at all.’

‘But no rats, eh,’ said Dad.

‘Absolutely not, Mr Ladd. You say that you don’t give a rat’s arse there, and the locals have no idea what you’re talking about. On the other hand there’s scorpions as big as saucers and beetles bigger than tortoises to do the scavenging.’

‘And are the tortoises any threat?’

‘Only to the babies,’ I reassured him. ‘In Ecuador babies are always left in hammocks, never on the ground where the tortoises can get at them. Even so, you notice that a lot of children there have a toe or two missing.’

‘How long did you have to stay there, in Whatsit?’

‘Oh, I was in Honduras for a couple of years. I had to oversee the establishment of professional development best practice guidelines for the drug cartels.’

‘But no rats at all, you say?’

‘I brought one of the Venezuelan lilies back, and I’ll put it in your room. No rat will come near the place, believe me. The pollen may make you sneeze a bit, but as for the rats it’s adios amigo.’

‘And the turtles?’

‘It’s too dry for them here, and MAF won’t let you bring them in because of the possible diseases,’ I said. ‘You should have a really good sleep tonight.’

‘Well, the nights seem to be getting longer.’ Dad’s tone was glum. ‘I can’t seem to get my joints comfortable for any length of time.’

‘Maybe we can suss out where those pills are.’

‘I suppose it’s always warm in Guatemala?’ said Dad.

‘But in the rainy season,’ I said, ‘the water comes so high beneath the pole houses that you can hear the alligators scraping their tails against the piles, and the giant toads cluster on the windows until the light is blocked out.’

‘Rats are mighty swimmers, the buggers,’ said Dad.

At some stage the little girl next door had reclaimed her trike and was again circling intently: I think the three of us were slightly dizzy. Dad gave a yawn that displayed a lower lip like that of an elephant, and massaged his face. I wondered if Angeline would notice if I took an inch or two off his eyebrows, but then reminded myself that neither he nor I would feel any better as a result. Boredom is not often a productive motivation. I wondered also about the mutual effects of our time together, whether the consequence of the meeting of my youth and his extreme old age would be a more intermediate and beneficial setting for us both: a median view of life.

That day’s evening meal was the last I needed to consider, for Angeline and her husband, marriage restored if all went well, were to be back next morning. A sense of closure gave significance to the occasion, and I went out to Angeline’s deep-freeze and found a heavy pack of pork slices. A few games of squash and I would burn off the fat from the desirable crackling; in Dad’s case surely he didn’t have enough time left for cumulative diet-related diseases to be a threat. ‘I thought we’d treat ourselves to pork, Mr Ladd,’ I said, and got together carrots, potatoes and peas as a counter to that indulgence.

‘Ah,’ said Dad, ‘I could do with a drink.’

‘Okay, but we’re not having as much as last night.’

‘Eh?’

‘Nothing. You’re just not going to rip into it the way you did last night, though it was my fault.’

‘What happened last night?’ said Dad.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘You slept like a dead man because of the booze.’

‘Who’s the dead man?’ asked Dad.

‘We’ll have one bottle of red with the pork,’ I said, and Dad nodded.

I moved Dad into the lounge, and put a tray on his lap as preparation. There was something on the television about rearing livestock in barns in the American Midwest — all very American Gothic, and Dad had difficulty in getting a handle on it. I tried to keep his interest up as I cooked dinner. I didn’t want him getting his papers out again and recycling them endlessly. ‘Looks like a pretty big operation they’ve got going on those farms,’ I said, coming in to give him a very moderate top-up.

‘What’s that?’ Dad was gazing at the screen as if it were a box of snakes.

‘All those cattle indoors for months, aren’t they?’

‘Cattle — is that what they are?’

‘Aren’t they?’

‘Look sort of funny,’ he said. ‘It’s dark, isn’t it. I reckon there’s something wrong with the picture.’

‘It’s just being inside, I suppose.’

‘Who wants to watch cattle inside all the time? What the hell is this all about I want to know,’ said Dad. He had a good point arrived at in a roundabout sort of way.

Dad enjoyed his pork. He did take eternity cutting it up, but I resisted the urge to do it for him. Many of the peas escaped him and lay on the tray, his lap, or the carpet around him like green beads. We had a packet of shortbread biscuits for afters, and a cup of coffee.

‘Is Viv coming in?’ Dad asked. He always spoke fondly of his dead wife.

‘No.’

‘What about the children?’

‘Angeline comes back tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow,’ said Dad with surprise and emphasis, as if he had been convinced her return was to be the present day, or any day other than tomorrow. He steepled his hands and worked his long, loose face like a pantomime actor. ‘And you are again?’ he said.

It was the one day we hadn’t had an outing, and so without bothering about any confusing preamble of intent or agreement, I stood Dad up in a scatter of peas and we went out into the warm decay of the summer day. The golf course was all vague nature in the twilight. Houses we passed were at their best, blemishes hidden, and weeds not readily distinguished from their invited cousins. It was a slow outing. Dad’s walking stick was varnished, and had a rubber stopper on the end, and he lingered as ever to poke at things: unusual letter boxes, shrubs intruding across the footpath, a dog turd. ‘How long have I lived here?’ he asked. Death can be a sudden fall of the curtain, the cataclysmic closure; it can also be a gradual deprivation of those aspects of consciousness we need to remain in touch with the world. Dad at times seemed in a dinghy drifting further and further out from the rest of us on the shore. ‘I’ll need to get back to work tomorrow,’ he said.

‘What’s so important?’

‘My son, Theo, is joining the board. It’s what I’ve always wanted.’

‘That’s really great,’ I said. ‘I bet he’ll give you a lot of support.’ My landlady said Theo had drowned in Nepal, and hadn’t liked his father anyway, so in regard to his son at least, Dad’s loss of short-term memory was a blessing for him.

‘Well, you haven’t got the skills to make a contribution at that level, have you,’ he said candidly. ‘And no degree.’

‘You’re right.’ I didn’t need reminding about such things.

It took us a while to complete the small suburban block and the dusk was more pervasive by the time we reached home again. Dad would have walked right past the gate and begun another slow circuit, but I directed him up the path from which he swung at a few parched flowers with his stick.

‘So who are we visiting here?’ he asked.

‘We live here,’ I said.

‘Like hell we do,’ but nevertheless Dad was willing to come inside and be surprised by every room all over again. ‘We’ve had our dinner, have we?’ he wanted to know, and, with rather more diffidence, ‘Are you staying the night?’

‘I’m Brian, here to keep you company.’

‘You’ll have to excuse me if I don’t entertain you. I’ve a good deal of work on. Business, you know.’

‘That’s fine.’

After sundown the bad times came for Dad — well, other world times at least. It showed in his increasing uneasiness and fidgeting. As well as all the stuff with his hands, he pulled strange faces, puckering his lips, or stretching them in an exaggerated and mirthless grin, shooting his bushy eyebrows aloft, and clamping his lower jaw out. All a quite unconscious exhibition of gurning. I wondered if it was a sign of lesser, gremlin personality traits normally suppressed by the deliberate imposition of an integrated character; a sort of geriatric possession having nothing to do with right or wrong. We began the laborious process of getting him ready for bed.

And it was marked not just by mutual effort, but mutual indignity. He wasn’t sufficiently supple, or balanced, to soap himself in the shower: arthritis made it difficult for him to raise his arms above his shoulders, or to touch his own feet. I stood in the doorway of the shower to help, lathered his wobbly head, watched the shampoo suds slide over the corrugations of his collapsed chest. Dad gasped happily in the hot jet and the swirling steam, and would have fallen several times had I not gripped his elbow. He was all bone and tendon, and the nails on his big toes were thick, opaque and yellow. As we stood together afterwards in the bathroom and I dried his bum and cock with a lush, blue towel, the incongruity of it all gave me a brief laugh, and Dad chuckled just to follow suit. Two strangers — Dad couldn’t even remember my name — so intimate, so innocent, together. ‘Is it morning, or night?’ he whispered. His hair stood up damply and his eyes roamed in their deep sockets.

‘Night,’ I said. ‘It’s night now.’

‘Will the rats come for the pomegranate seeds?’

‘Not a chance now we’ve got the Ecuadorian lily,’ I said.

‘Of course. Of course, and what a relief for all,’ he said. ‘There weren’t many women in the war you know, but I saw a falcon high up above the desert before the tank attack.’

As I swotted in the lounge, I could hear Dad singing to himself in bed. There were some words, some humming, and a good deal of pom pom and pum pum as he entertained himself. He talked to himself too, posing such questions as why the sheet had got caught up, where the wardrobe door led to, and when he’d need to get up to leave in time for the meeting. And he answered each question with interest and patience as one might to a friend. In a moment of wishful thinking I imagined the night was to be peaceful and mercifully swift.

I went to bed with a head full of the battle of Gettysburg: Cashtown Inn, Willoughby’s Run and McPherson’s Barn, and photographers with the armies for the first time. But barely had the smoke cleared when I was woken by the noise made by Dad barging about in the dark hallway. The slick, green numerals told me it was 3.36 a.m. and Dad was weeping loudly. I went out and lit up the hallway. Dad had taken off his pyjamas and wore dark suit trousers and his beloved long coat. ‘Where am I?’ he implored brokenly. ‘And who the hell are you?’

‘I’m Brian.’

‘Who?’

‘I’m keeping you company,’ I said.

‘Where’s Viv and the kids?’

I began an explanation to bridge some thirty or forty years, but Dad turned away with a hollow moan and wandered back into his bedroom. Nothing related to the present was any consolation to him. There seemed no option but to follow him through the looking glass. I persuaded him to exchange suit trousers for pyjama ones by pointing out he had no underpants, but agreed that the coat of the high plains drifter was useful in protecting him in case he was visited by the rats from the other side. Dad went reluctantly back into bed, and to settle him I sat under the covers beside him, for at four o’clock it was cool enough wandering in my boxers. ‘Angeline’s coming tomorrow,’ I said. ‘You’ll like that.’

Dad nodded, his lined face glinting with tears. ‘What about Viv and Theo?’

‘Yep, the whole family.’ So could I assume power of life and death, and summon back his wife and the watery Theo. Anything to keep his mind off the rats; anything to help us drift through the darkness without despair.

‘Things haven’t always been easy, you know, Warren,’ Dad admonished me. ‘We had a truck load of trouble with Theo. For a while there he just seemed to go from one scrape to another and we were at our wits’ end.’

‘I suppose most young guys go through a time when they’re fooling with drugs and stuff.’

‘You don’t know the half of it,’ said Dad. ‘You know he was still stealing money from us when he was nearly thirty years old. He had a baby with a girl in Sydney and he abandoned them both and went trekking in Nepal.’ Dad stopped and listened for a time. ‘It’s very windy outside,’ he said, yet everything was still.

‘A real southerly buster,’ I said.

‘Anyway, things haven’t always been easy. But they were both great kids and Angeline was never any trouble at all. You worry more about your kids than your own life, do you know that?’

‘Absolutely.’

Dad was quiet for a time, but his hands and face twitched and shimmied as the outward show of some inner agitation, a string of Tom Thumb crackers somewhere along his nervous system. I thought maybe a song or two would calm him, and allow me to go back to my own bed. I was tired, and worried about Dad’s condition.

‘Let’s sing a bit,’ I said.

‘Eh?’

‘Sing a bit. You like that.’

‘What time is it?’ said Dad.

‘Time to sing,’ I said, but then couldn’t think of anything that both Dad and I would know well. I finally came up with ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and then ‘Lili Marlene’. Dad enjoyed that especially, and the singing was more successful than I’d hoped.

Only once he stopped singing and put a hand to my mouth, then said, ‘Listen to that storm outside.’ There was no wind at all. Or maybe winds cracked their cheeks for Dad that I was too young and temporal to hear.

‘Maybe it’s inside,’ I said. ‘Let’s drown it out.’

We sang ‘How Much is that Doggie in the Window’, and ‘Some Enchanted Evening’. Songs are sung by people and in places never contemplated by their composers, and for reasons quite inexplicable in normal times, and we must have been as odd a juxtaposition as any. Eighty-eight-year-old Mr Ladd and twenty-year-old me, strangers in bed together well before the dawn. When we had sung ourselves out, I told Dad I was going to my own room. ‘Do you want the light left on?’ I asked him.

‘Better had,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s the swordfish making all that noise outside.’

‘They’re not doing any harm,’ I said.

‘Things haven’t always been easy, you know, Warren.’

‘So you said.’

‘Why have I got this coat on in bed?’

‘You might have to get up for a piss.’

‘Nothing’s like it was before,’ said Dad and he lay back on the pillows. ‘Someone keeps coming in and watching me when I’m asleep,’ he whispered.

‘How do you know?’

‘I can hear them breathing,’ Dad said.

I stopped in the doorway for a last check. There he lay with the top of his black coat poking out from the bedclothes and his caricature of a face on the pillow. He was looking back at me, and I bet he was wondering who I was again.

‘It’ll be morning soon,’ I said.

I dropped into my bed as if pole-axed, and into a pit of sleep too deep even for dreams. I awoke to full daylight and the noise made by Dad as he tried to manage himself in the lavatory. I hoped to God he’d taken off the coat, and found my appeal divinely answered. The other things could be washed easily.

‘Did you have a good night?’ I asked him, wondering what he remembered of the swordfish, the southerly and the songs.

‘An okay night, I suppose,’ said Dad vaguely. ‘It’s not as comfortable as my own bed somehow.’

We had our last breakfast together, and Dad was too polite to ask who I was, so I told him anyway. He perked up when I said that Angeline was returning before lunch, and gave me a history of her school achievements, which included awards for physics and impromptu speaking. In the fifth form she gave a reading from the Book of Job at the school prizegiving. ‘Theo didn’t do himself justice at school,’ Dad said.

There was a full, gleaming summer sun for my last morning with Dad. He sat on the patio again in his black coat and seemed to gradually expand in the heat. I had found his best shoes for him to wear in honour of his daughter’s homecoming, and their domed, black toes shone at the end of his grey trousers. While I had a clean-up inside the house I could hear Dad talking to himself from time to time, but there was no anxiety in his tone. He seemed to be scrutinising and rearranging bits of his life from long ago. I took particular care to hide the last empty wine bottles well down in the rubbish bag. I packed my gear ready to leave and put it by the Suzuki. ‘Are you getting ready to go somewhere?’ asked Dad as I came back to the patio with mugs of tea.

‘I’ve got exams in a few days,’ I said, and he gave a little chortle as though pleased to be missing out on such things himself. I wanted to wish him well, but wasn’t sure how I could do that with sincerity when I knew what was happening to him: the inevitable path before him. ‘You look after yourself and don’t worry about things,’ I said. How could I thank him for not dying on me during my time of supervision.

‘Thank you. Thank you,’ he replied huskily. ‘The nights get longer, don’t you think? I suppose I’m not doing much during the day to tire me out.’

Dad was having a snooze when Angeline and her husband returned, but he woke up and knew her immediately, though I thought perhaps he was for a moment surprised to find her so grown up. What a hug they had and then a flurry of questions and answers about their trip and our stay, which bewildered him, and after a minute or two he turned to Angeline’s husband and politely asked him who he was again. Welcome to the club. ‘Goodness, Dad, you’re wearing that greatcoat on a scorcher of a day,’ said Angeline and she raised her eyebrows at me.

‘He feels good with it on,’ I said. ‘He likes the heat, doesn’t he.’

Angeline called me into the lounge to give me my money in a manila envelope. ‘Was everything all right?’ she asked, looking at me keenly. She and I knew there was a rich history to my stay, that there had been wild moments on the heath, but that nothing would be served by the rendition of it blow by blow. To talk about it, to admit to such things as we knew, would give them substance and power.

‘He wasn’t so good at night, but otherwise things were okay.’

‘That’s the pattern of his dementia,’ she said.

It wasn’t easy to say goodbye to Dad, for in some ways I never really got to say hello. I wished him well and took his big, loose hand in mine, and he said thank you and that it was a pleasure. But when I was on the motorbike, about to start, with my squash bag balanced on the tank and handle bars, he stood up from his patio chair and called out, ‘Warren, Warren.’

‘What is it?’ I said.

He gaped at me for a moment, gave a rueful smile. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said in his hollow voice. ‘I’ll tell you next time.’

Angeline smiled as apology for her father’s confusion, her husband raised a bland hand. As I rode down the drive I had a last view of Dad standing in the hot sun in his black, gunslinger’s greatcoat. In all that mundane suburban scene he was the innocent and hapless harbinger of howling winds, swordfish, lilies and rats, womenless wars, and the high cliff before the chasm.