Father’s skill being this bad, I feared that his senility would grow worse. As expected, it did. One morning, very early, when the sky was still hazy and Ah-bing and I still asleep, we were suddenly woken by the fuss Father was making out in the living room. I went to look first and he mistook me for Mum. He asked where he was: he didn’t recognize the place. I told him he was at home, but he flatly and doggedly refused to believe me; he wanted to leave. Then Ah-bing came into the room and Father stood for a moment, stunned and frightened. His whole body began to tremble. He kept apologizing to Ah-bing: he seemed to think that we – himself and his ‘wife’, me – had entered the wrong house and he hoped that this ‘stranger’, Ah-bing, would forgive him. Of course, we took him back to the hospital and this time asked if he could be admitted for treatment. He was, but later that same day, in the evening, he tried to run away. Nothing seemed to console him, nor could anyone stop him from going. He believed that he wasn’t ill. The doctors ran a battery of tests and confirmed that he wasn’t suffering from anything that they could detect. His state of mind was sober and clear-headed; he certainly didn’t seem to be suffering the onset of dementia.

But we knew that Father had a problem, it was just that it manifested itself in peculiar ways. He would seem to fall ill and then not be ill – it was as if the things surrounding him were playing hide-and-seek, tormenting him ceaselessly. One evening, as I was taking him for a walk, we saw near the main gate a red leather ball that some child or other must have left. When we returned from our walk, the ball was still there. Father stopped and stared at it, then turned about. I asked him where he was going and he said he was going home. I told him that we were already headed in the direction of our house, but he didn’t believe me. He turned to face me and pointed at the ball, then explained: ‘That ball is not normally in front of our house. Since it isn’t normal for it to be there, its appearance is meant to confuse; but for a confused person such things cannot always remain the same …’ and so on, and so forth.