On Tuesdays, at 1:30, Ornella, you play bocce with the residents and a group of respite patients. Erin, the carer, unrolls the green rubber field on the concrete, and we distribute balls of varying colours and weights to the players. Estelle always has yellow and Colin chooses light blue. Some of the men are incapable of heeding the word ‘Gentle!’ and they propel every bocce ball out of the field and onto the concrete. Maybe they think they are playing ten-pin bowling. Maybe they remember that they are men and rise to the challenge with too much enthusiasm. You don’t care what colour balls you get, Ornella, you don’t notice. Each time they are placed in your hands, you look at them freshly, oddly, and then look up to me for explanation. You worry about not knowing what you should do.

But the body remembers. It remembers things the brain no longer can. It remembers the sipping at cups, the cutting of food, the perambulation of hips required in order to walk. It remembers. It swallows and breathes and sleeps, it drinks and eats. These are the last things it forgets.

You took on the job of raising me after Mother died, Ornella. The majority of the job, anyway. When it came down to it, there was only you, who didn’t have a creative bone in your body. I’d already learned to live with Carlito, who’d taught me the more cartoonish foils of manhood, before settling softly into middle age and letting himself go: teeth, hair, stomach. He worked on the docks til retirement, and then, like so many men of his era, when the work stopped and the pension started, he was dead of a heart attack in a matter of months.

Papa was good for nothing after Mother died. He was good for work—he didn’t stop working—but he was no good at being a father. He had to stop that, he couldn’t do that anymore. Meanwhile, you got up every morning, Ornella, and went to work; you came home and cooked and cleaned; you checked I had done my homework; you made plans for my birthdays and carried them out, read my reports and told me off if I was not up to scratch. Reliably present in your no-nonsense shoes. You were brisk, but your bedside manner was always good.

After Mother died, you made me a bed on the couch in front of the television where I could eat toast dipped in runny boiled egg and watch Skippy. I was way, way too old for Skippy but I stayed there a long time—days, it seems. And every time Skippy’s big brown eyes came up in the close-up, I thought of Paddy Cow, and how, when eyes are dead, they stop being intelligent and feeling and go like marbles. It’s such a little thing, such a little difference. The way seeing just stops.