My father intended to retire on his sixty-second birthday and my mother made loose plans to mark that date with a trip to Britain, before they grew too old to enjoy travelling to the places they had known and loved as a young couple. The special birthday was in September 1996 but on the fourth of July he returned home from work in agony and went into hospital. He was told he had stomach cancer and died twenty days later.

Pete was very neat in his ways, without being fanatical. When he came home from the surgery, he always tucked his bag into a dark corner beside the foot of the stairs. He placed it carefully, so that it stood upright and was always parallel with the bottom bannister. I doubt he ever took much notice of the way he lined up his bag; it was something he did automatically. On the day he came home sick, he dropped his bag in the hall and staggered up to his bed. The bag was on the rug, at an angle to the stairs, in a place it had never been before. It stayed there until after Carrie, by then a medical student, arrived to take him and my mother to hospital and then I carried it across to the foot of the stairs and placed it very carefully in its rightful place. It remained there for the next five years.

Eventually, the house I grew up in, and returned to frequently during my student years and months of unemployment, was sold to a wealthy neighbour. No one lived in it, and it fell into a state of disrepair. It was damaged in the earthquakes, and demolished. Nothing remained. The land reverted to wilderness, the growth so dense that the garden was not only unrecognisable but impassable. Even the row of lime trees gracing the driveway fell down and landed in a heap.

My father’s bag sat on a shelf in my mother’s new garage. As a kid I used to play with the bag as if it were a kind of doll’s house. It was made to stand upright, and its main compartment was divided into drawers of various shapes and sizes, each with a small leather pull tab. I would ease open all the drawers, removing the stethoscope, the reflex hammer, the blood pressure gauge and the otoscope, examining them carefully. My father taught me how to take blood pressure, how to watch the gauge and mark the slight hiccups as the gauge dropped, and to listen to the change in volume of the heartbeat. One small drawer in the case contained disposable syringes; another flat drawer was lined with thick sponge, glass vials arranged neatly in the perforated spaces. There was a drawer full of pills, numerous small golden cylinders labelled with patients’ names. Another drawer was filled with bandages, gauze and rolls of beige cotton tape. For a reason I never worked out, this drawer had a very particular smell, warm like amber or leather but somehow sweeter, as if caramelised. It was a smell I could never quite identify, though I often tried.