Escape from Shangri-La by Michael Morpurgo Page B

together. He’d listen to me playing my violin, and I’d listen to him reciting his favourite poems. It was strange. He couldn’t even remember where he lived, but he knew his poems off by heart, dozens of them. I wasn’t sure I always understood them,but I loved listening to him, because when Popsicle read poetry he made the words sing.
    What he still looked forward to most though was our daily walk to the park to feed the ducks. Once out there in the park he just loved to talk, never about his past though, and never about my father. He loved to think out loud. As with the poems, I have to say I couldn’t always follow all of it, but I listened all the same because I knew he was confiding in me, trusting in me, and I felt honoured by that.
    The day it happened we were on our way back home from the park. We had to stop at the shop for some milk. He was tired by this time, but that never stopped him talking. ‘Have you ever thought, Cessie?’ he was saying. ‘Have you ever thought that this is all a dream? All of it, the ducks, the pond, this shop, you, me, all of it, nothing but a funny old dream. Maybe all you do when you die is wake up, and then you don’t remember anything anyway because you never remember dreams, do you? You know what they say, Cessie? They say in the last two minutes before you die you live your whole life over again. Looks like I’ll have to wait till then to remember. Be a bit late by then, bit late to do anything about it, I mean.’ He was frowning now. There’s something I’ve still got to put right, Cessie, I know thereis, something I’ve got to do. Trouble is, I can’t for the life of me remember what it is.’
    We were inside the shop by now and walking along past the breakfast cereals and the coffee and the tea, towards the fridge at the back. Popsicle had stopped talking. I was a while finding the two-litre carton of semi-skimmed I was looking for. When I turned round Popsicle had vanished. I panicked, but I needn’t have. I found him almost at once near the check-out desk. He had taken a tin off the shelf.
    â€˜What’ve you got?’ I asked him.
    â€˜There’s something, Cessie, something I’ve remembered,’ he said.
    I read the label out loud. ‘Condensed milk?’
    â€˜All I know is that I like it,’ he went on, ‘that I’ve always liked it.’ He was looking at me strangely, as if I wasn’t there. ‘There were searchlights. There were searchlights and I couldn’t get out. I couldn’t get out.’
    â€˜What d’you mean?’ I asked.
    â€˜I don’t know, Cessie. That’s the trouble, I don’t know what I mean. But this, this tin is part of what I’ve got to remember, I know it is. I can’t think, Cessie, I can’t think.’ His eyes were tight closed and he was banging the tin repeatedly against the side of his head. Everyone was looking at us now, so I bought the milkand the tin of condensed milk, took Popsicle by the arm and left the shop as quickly as I could. All the way home he was lost in himself, and that was how he stayed.
    After that he wouldn’t go out for his walk any more. He wouldn’t read his poetry. He’d simply sit in his chair in the sitting-room, frowning incessantly and gazing into nowhere. If ever I offered to play my violin for him, he’d just shake his head. Whatever my mother put on his plate he refused to touch, not even pancakes and maple syrup, and he adored pancakes and maple syrup. ‘The look of it doesn’t taste nice,’ he said. He said such odd things these days. She was worried about him, and I could see my father was too; but I wasn’t. I knew what they didn’t know, that he’d discovered a clue to his past and was struggling to work out what it meant. Once he’d worked it out, then the door to his memory would open and everything would be fine. I was sure of