Memory is a strange beast, isn’t it? It throws up such random things. Presents itself to us in different ways.

Sepia-tinted, some of them. Black-and-white, others. Glaring Technicolor. Some are magnified. Larger than life. Insistent. And others are like the images you see when you look through the wrong end of binoculars. Distant and small. You doubt the truth of them.

I have no idea why I’m remembering my six-year-old birthday party. Did I even have a birthday party? In the memory, the house is crammed with six-year-olds, which seems unlikely.

I abandon myself to the Hare Krishnas and the chocolate cake and the singing and the dancing. So does Dad. I see myself from a distance. See the shape of the memory that this will become. A Technicolor memory. A gangly, middle-aged woman dancing with her father and singing a Hare Krishna song even though she doesn’t know the words. She doesn’t know the language.

Afterwards, when the Hare Krishnas move on, I realize that they didn’t try to convert me. Aren’t they supposed to do that? Maybe I’m mixing them up with the Mormons. Those door-to-door young men in pressed suits.

The Hare Krishnas just fed me. How kind of them. But I am no closer to finding Iris.

I consult my guidebook. There is a money museum. Iris would not go there. There are murals painted by an artist called Augusto Giacometti on the vaulted ceilings of the police station. Iris would like to see those, but maybe she already has? While I was dancing with the Hare Krishnas?

And now it’s getting dark. What on earth was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking at all.

I need to think.

THINK.

There is a mountain in the city which seems comfortingly Swiss. You can take a train to the top. This seems like an Iris thing to do. I look at Dad. He is leaning against the trunk of a tree, his head nodding as if he is agreeing with something only he can hear. His eyes are closed.

I can’t take him to the top of the mountain.

“Come on, Dad.” I put my hand on his shoulder, shake him gently. His eyes spring open, startled.

“Bedtime,” I tell him, holding out my hand. He takes it. I don’t have to pull hard to get him upright. He is as light as a bag of feathers. Barely there. The taxi I hail drops us at the back of the hotel where the guests’ cars are parked. I find Iris’s iPad in the glove compartment. Underneath it is Iris’s ancient copy of The Secret Garden.

I pick it up. Back in the hotel room, I give Dad his tablet, get him to open his mouth afterwards, stick out his tongue, which he does like the obedient child he has become. He hands me his dentures, I brush them, settle them in a glass of water on a high shelf in the bathroom so it doesn’t occur to him to take them and hide them.