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‘You know, before I die.’
Callum leaned back in the chair, and sighed. ‘Let’s not be talking about dying, Dad.’
‘Now, where did I put it?’
‘Put what?’
He tapped his temple. ‘Memory is not quite what it was.’
Callum heaved a sigh, staring at his dad as stood up and wandered around the room, opening drawers and cupboard doors. ‘I know I put it somewhere for safekeeping ...’
‘Perhaps I can help you look?’
‘No, I’ll remember in a minute.’
Callum doubted that.
‘Ah ha!’ He turned around from the windowsill. ‘It was under the flowerpot.’ He held up a keyring with some keys. He walked over and handed the keys to Callum.
‘Um, okay.’ He studied the keys. He recognised two of them. ‘Hey, this is the key to the garage, and this one is to your van.’
His father grinned. ‘I know.’
Callum stared at his father, who looked very pleased with himself. Was this why he had returned to the house – to get the keys and the van? Callum thought his mum ought to know that his dad had a spare set of keys to his campervan. He shuddered to think what might happen if his dad was let loose behind the wheel of a van.
‘I think I’ll keep hold of these, Dad. If you don’t mind.’
‘Of course I don’t mind, son. That’s the point.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, you see I remember now. I remember everything.’
Callum offered his father a weak smile.How sad that he thinks he does, he thought. Callum recalled that he had been hosting another stupid party at his Beverly Hills mansion when he had got the call from his mum with the diagnosis. He’d told all those people who’d turned up, whom he barely knew, to piss off; that the party was over.
Then he’d gone and sat by the pool on his own and cried. He knew what the diagnosis meant. It was a cruel disease, making you watch a person you had known and loved disappear bit by bit; the biggest anomaly being that they were still there, walking, talking, alive, but that the person they had once been, that everyone had known, had gone.
Callum looked at the keys in his hand. He frowned. ‘What are the other two keys for?’ He knew they weren’t door keys to the house. He imagined that when his mum had found his father in the study, he had got into the house via the back door, which opened onto a small pathway between the detached garage and the house that led into the back garden. His mum never locked the back door when she was indoors.
‘Aha! Now that’s the important bit. One of those keys is to my desk drawer. I left something in there for you.’
‘When you turned up at the house in the taxi?’
‘Yes, I told you, I remember now.’
Callum looked at him quizzically, but decided not to argue. ‘All right.’
He was about to ask what the other key was for, when his father said, ‘And in my study is my wallet. I need you to fetch it.’
‘Your wallet?’ He glanced at his father’s wallet on the bedside table. ‘Your wallet is right here.’
He shook his head from side to side. ‘That’s not my wallet.’
Callum breathed a heavy sigh. It had started off so well, his father remembering him and what he did for a living, but the fog that was dementia – at least that was how Callum thought of it –was drawing in once again, enveloping his memories, robbing him of his lucidity.
Callum reached for the wallet. He opened it and got out his bank card. ‘See, here are your cards with your name on.’ Thumbing through, he found a photo of himself as a boy. He was a little overcome with emotion that his father was carrying it. ‘Hey, and look, it’s me, your son.’
Unexpectedly, his father grabbed the photo, and the wallet, and threw them on the floor. ‘No! That is not my wallet!’
