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doesn’t want to be reminded…’
    I lift Emma from the car. She immediately wraps her arms around my neck like a koala clinging to a tree.
    Charlie continues tel ing Julianne about the news report. Why are children so fascinated by death? Dead birds. Dead animals. Dead insects.
    ‘How was school?’ I ask, trying to change the subject.
    ‘Good.’
    ‘Learn anything?’

    Charlie rol s her eyes. I have asked her this same question every afternoon of every school day since she started kindergarten. She gave up answering long ago.
    The house is suddenly fil ed with noise and industry. Julianne starts dinner while I bath Emma and spend ten minutes looking for her pyjamas while she runs naked in and out of Charlie’s room.
    I cal downstairs, ‘I can’t find Emma’s pyjamas.’
    ‘In her top drawer.’
    ‘I looked.’
    ‘Under her pil ow.’
    ‘No.’
    I know what’s going to happen. Julianne wil come al the way upstairs and discover the pyjamas sitting right in front of me. It’s cal ed ‘domestic blindness’. She yel s to Charlie. ‘Help your father find Emma’s pyjamas.’
    Emma wants a bedtime story. I have to make one up involving a princess, a fairy and a talking donkey. That’s what happens when you give a three-year-old creative control. I kiss her goodnight and leave her door partly open.
    Supper. A glass of wine. I do the dishes. Julianne fal s asleep on the sofa and apologises dreamily as I coax her upstairs and run her a bath.
    These are our best nights, when we haven’t seen one another for a few days; touching, brushing against each other, almost unable to wait until Charlie is in bed.
    ‘Do you know why she jumped?’ asks Julianne, slipping into the bath. I sit on the edge of the tub, trying to keep contact with her eyes. My gaze wants to drift lower to where her nipples are poking through the bubbles.
    ‘She wouldn’t talk to me.’
    ‘She must have been very sad.’
    ‘Yes, she must have been.’

    3

    Midnight. It is raining again. Water gurgles in the downpipes outside our bedroom window, sliding down the hil into a stream that has become a river and covered the causeway and stone bridge.
    I used to love being awake when my girls were sleeping. It made me feel like a guardian, watching over them, keeping them safe. Tonight is different. Every time I shut my eyes I see images of a tumbling body and the ground opens up beneath me.
    Julianne wakes once and slides her hand across the sheets and onto my chest, as if trying to stil my heart.
    ‘It’s al right,’ she whispers. ‘You’re here with me.’
    Her eyes haven’t opened. Her hand slides away.
    At six in the morning I take a smal white pil . My leg is twitching like a dog in the midst of a dream, chasing rabbits in its sleep. Slowly it becomes stil . In Parkinson’s parlance, I am now
    ‘on’. The medication has kicked in.
    It is four years since my left hand gave me the message. It wasn’t written down, or typed or printed on fancy paper. It was an unconscious, random flicker of my fingers, a twitch, a ghost movement, a shadow made real. Unknown to me then, working in secret, my brain had begun divorcing my mind. It has been a long drawn-out separation with no legal argument over division of assets— who gets the CD col ection and Aunt Grace’s antique sideboard?
    The divorce began with my left hand and spread to my arm and my leg and my head. Now it feels as if my body is being owned and operated by someone else who looks like me only less familiar.
    When I look at old home movies I can see the changes even two years before the diagnosis. I’m on the sidelines, watching Charlie play footbal . My shoulders are canted forwards, as though I’m braced against a cold wind. Is it the beginning of a stoop?
    I have been through the five stages of grief and mourning. I have denied it, ranted at the unfairness, made pacts with God, crawled into a dark hole and final y accepted my fate. I have a progressive, degenerative