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And when we were going really fast, I talked to John the way anyone might talk to someone who cared about them. I told him some of the mean things that people said to me, which was the kind of stuff I would have told Mum if she'd happened to be around at the time. I explained to him how Sydney, Australia, was roughly 17,420 kilometers away, and about what had happened to Brian—things that were hard to talk to anyone else about. I'm not saying he understood all the details or anything, but he definitely listened to me, unlike a lot of other people I know. As we thundered along, I sometimes whispered a song to him that my mum used to sing to me when I was smaller. I don't really know why, because it was all about seeing a baby for the first time and wanting to kiss the baby and relatively embarassing stuff like that, but I know he liked the sound of it. John was warm and strong and full of power. I always had this feeling, even when we were going very fast, that somehow he and my granddad were keeping me safe.

All the time we galloped around the place, Granddad would be proud and delighted-looking, with his cheeks getting lovely and red. After we'd finished, Granddad would help me hose John down and brush him. And then we'd feed him and settle him back in his stable, and me and Granddad would walk home.

I wanted it to be like that forever. The three of us hanging out together at the stables. But in the end Granddad couldn't come with me anymore. He tried his best and everything,
but just because you try your best doesn't always mean you get superb results.

That last autumn was cold but it hardly ever rained as far as I remember, and by the time we'd finished, the light was always completely gone.

“I love the dark. I love the dark,” he'd say as we walked home together under the evening sky.

“Yeah, I know, Granddad. You keep telling me,” I'd say back.

But I understood what he meant. The dark is like a blanket, lying over the world, waiting to be pulled back so everything will be clear again.

Chapter 3

I KNOW THERE'S a recession and everything, but Australia? That's more or less the farthest away you can get. I bet Mum that there were new markets somewhere a bit closer than that, and she even said I was probably right. But anything Mum says doesn't count if she's checking e-mail on her cell phone when she's saying it. She'd been gone for ages. She'd said she'd be back in no time. I was beginning to think that “no time” was right. No time, as in never.

ACTION NUMBER 3:
Make omega-3 fatty acids part of your loved one's daily nutrition plan.

Omega-3 oils contain all of the ingredients you need to help keep the brain strong. The best source is fish—smoked salmon is a handy staple to have in the fridge. It can be used in a wide range of snacks and healthy meals.

There was an excellent special offer in the supermarket, where you could buy two whole sides of smoked salmon in taped-together packets for ten ninety-nine. I took enough money out of Gran's bag to buy five packs, because it's not
every day you come across money-saving offers like that.

The woman at the checkout wanted to know if I was having a party. It was none of her business. I just said yes, I was.

“Well, the best of luck with it,” she said, and I said, “Yeah, right, thanks.”

When Gran opened the fridge, about three of the packets fell out onto the floor, and she went ballistic, which is something she usually never does. She said I was no better than a thief, which was a total misrepresentation of the situation. She said I needed immediately to snap out of whatever behavioral issues I was in the middle of having, because she had enough to deal with already.

I made smoked salmon pâté from a recipe I got on the Internet, with lemon juice and pepper. It took me ages. “God bless the information age,” said my granddad. He said that it was pretty much the most delicious thing he'd tasted in his whole life. Gran said that, funnily enough, she often used to make that
exact
same recipe many years ago, but that Granddad must have forgotten. She stood up, threw her napkin down on the chair, and walked really fast out of the room.

And then, as if there weren't enough tension in the house already, Granddad fell down the stairs. We had to call the ambulance, and me and Granny Deedee had to go with him to the hospital. It turned out he'd broken his leg. Granny Deedee gave the doctors a whole load of private
information about Granddad and his recent behavior, which I knew straightaway was a mistake.

The people in the hospital lent us a wheelchair. The sun was coming up when we eventually brought Granddad home.

The very next day this woman called Dr. Sally arrived at our house with a few other people. I was standing by the living room window. I saw them coming. They parked up on the sidewalk, which is illegal, and whispered to each other as they walked toward our front door. My gran told me they were social workers.

Dr. Sally wore a clean, smooth white shirt with small transparent plastic buttons in the shapes of flowers. The first thing she did was tell me all about her own spectacular children and how one of them was the same age as me, as if I actually cared. She smiled practically all the time. There's no possible way that anyone could really be as permanently happy and delighted and thrilled as she seemed to be.

She kept asking these irrelevant nosy questions, like where I did my homework and how long my mother had been away, and what we did on the weekends and how many people came to visit us.

She pronounced all her words fantastically carefully, especially when she was talking to Granddad, whom she obviously mistook for some kind of an imbecile. And in fairness, Granddad wasn't really much help in my mission to
get everyone to leave us alone. By then he had more or less stopped being able to do anything.

Dr. Sally said she was going to give Granddad “a little test.”

“Who is this, Kevin? Who. Is. This?” she shouted at him, loud and slow, pointing her neat nail-polished finger at me. Granddad looked pale and vacant and said, “Thank you,” which was obviously not the right answer.

“Stop it,” I said to her. “You're stressing him out. Leave him alone. He knows who I am. Just because he's not telling you doesn't mean he doesn't know.”

She kept saying, “All right, Cosmo. It's all right.”

And she kept saying how heartbreaking it must have been for me to have to see my granddad suffering like this. But to tell you the truth, it didn't break my heart. It just embarrassed my brain, which is a different thing completely.

I never asked her if I could see a copy of her qualifications, though I should have. I never asked her for a search warrant, either, but I should have done that, too, considering all the prying and poking around she did. Dr. Sally sat down with Granddad and asked him a whole load of other questions, like who the president of America was and why was a carrot like a potato and what year did World War II start and what was his first ever job and how did he lose his finger.

My granddad looked down at his hand and went, “Good God! My finger! It's missing. Assemble a search party!”

“That's what he always says. It's a joke,” I tried to explain,
but I could see from the way she was scribbling everything down on her clipboard that she didn't think it was funny.

A few days after that, without warning, Uncle Ted came back from San Francisco.

Gran was delighted to see him, and she said he was looking marvelous, which was definitely not true. He had a massive peeling red nose and a leather bag dangling over his shoulder. When Gran went off to make tea, Ted looked straight into my granddad's face and he said, “Howerya, Dad?” but Granddad didn't happen to be in the mood for a conversation, which was totally his prerogative. Ted asked me what all the Post-its were for, but I didn't feel like explaining the whole thing to him. Eventually he said, “The signs are for Dad, aren't they, Cosmo?” like he thought he was some kind of detective, and I said, “Yeah. Who did you think they were for?”

Ted is a scientist. The way he talked about his work, you'd get the impression that he spent his whole life splitting atoms and growing human spleens from the ears of rats and stuff. But he was very uncreative when it came to problems closer to home. Ted told me that no one ever recovers from Alzheimer's, which is what he said my granddad had. I definitely wasn't going to accept that. Why should you take one person's word for it when there are approximately a thousand websites that say the complete opposite?

“Cosmo, you're interfering with the natural order of things,” he said.

“Yes, well, what's wrong with that? If the natural order of things is as lousy as this, then it's my
responsibility
to interfere with it.”

He sighed.

“Listen, you're going to have to adjust like the rest of us. There's no point. You have to accept it. There's nothing we can do to get his memory back.”

“Shut up,” I whispered. “His memory might not be that great, but his hearing's perfect.”

And to prove it, as soon as the doorbell went, Granddad said I'd better get it because maybe this time it was Brian come back at last. And I said, “For the last time, Granddad, it's not Brian.”

Chapter 4