This Is the Life by Alex Shearer

children, although they did have Halley and Barbara’s aging mother to live with them. Halley was a regular visitor, and Louis had become a family friend.
    They would all spend Christmas together, eating turkey out in the hot Australian sunshine, while Derek did the basting or pried the top off another bottle, his voice booming as he barbecued the ham.
    * * *
    Halley turned up one day with a supply of foods that he had discovered from the Internet were good for tumors. There were a lot of oranges and ginger and cranberries. Louis never touched any of it and left the fruit to rot. I threw the stuff out with the kettle and didn’t tell Halley anything.
    â€œDerek’s suggesting meeting up for lunch this weekend down at Fried Fish. Bring your brother,” Halley said.
    It wasn’t really a question of Louis bringing his brother at all. It was a matter of his brother bringing him.
    They’d taken Louis’s license away the day they found the lump. He’d called me a few times over the preceding weeks, complaining of headaches and that his memory was going and that he was having trouble reading now and couldn’t understand what was going on.
    â€œLouis, it sounds to me like you’ve had some kind of a ministroke. You need to go to the doctor.”
    He went, eventually, and the doctor sent him for a scan. He took a morning off work to get the scan done. When it was finished the woman operating the machine came into the room, pale as snow, and said, “How long have you had this?”
    â€œHad what?” Louis said.
    â€œHow long have you had these symptoms?”
    â€œCouple of weeks,” Louis said. “Why?”
    She showed him the scan. There was a tumor in his head the size of a billiard ball.
    â€œI don’t know how you’re still walking around. Sit down. I’ll call an ambulance.”
    While they waited for it to arrive, she demanded his license.
    â€œThat means I can’t drive anymore?”
    â€œYou can apply to get it back at a later date.”
    He never did. Never got it. Never applied.
    * * *
    By the time I got there, Louis had already been operated on and was back out of the hospital. He didn’t want me to drivethe ute at first as he said I had gone soft and had become effete and soft-handed due to having driven nothing but automatics for the past ten years.
    â€œLouis,” I said. “It’s like a bicycle and an elephant—you never forget.”
    â€œWhen have you ever ridden an elephant?”
    â€œAs a matter of fact—”
    â€œYou’d better rent a car,” he said. But by then pride and stubbornness had got the better of me.
    I spent a morning on the phone and sorted out insurance. Then I got the keys and started up the ute. Earplugs would have been useful, as would a window that stayed up. But the gears were nowhere near as bad as Louis had made out. I ground them a few times and maybe drove the wrong way up a couple of one-way streets, but once I’d got over that, we were fine.
    For all that Louis’s short-term memory was giving him problems, he still had a map of the city fixed in his mind, and he knew the way to Fried Fish with his eyes closed.
    â€œOkay. Left here now,” he’d say. But then he’d raise his right hand.
    Or it would be the other way around.
    â€œIt’s right at this next intersection coming up.”
    And he’d point left.
    I decided that it was the gestures that were accurate and the words that were wrong, and so it proved to be. When he said left, I turned right.
    â€œThat’s fine now. Just keep going straight on ahead here and follow the car behind you.”
    â€œLouis—”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing.”
    I knew what he meant so I kept my mouth shut and we kept going on our way to Fried Fish. We sat outside the restaurant, with Louis in his beanie hat, smiling serenely like the Buddha, and Derek pouring the drinks out, and Babs