Whispering wind imitates Cerulean blue Holden Belmont.

She rang me late; it must have been 9.30 or 10 o'clock. He was coming up the drive, she said. She had heard all the familiar noises, she told me; the big side gate that was built in the late 1960s, steel and cyclone mesh, to keep children in and wandering dogs out. It groaned with its sheer weight when anyone opened it. She had heard it just like that day in 1968 when my father had to stop and get out of his cerulean blue Holden Belmont and open it before continuing up the drive; and these noises of gate dragging and car purring and soft coming-home voices had made her call me because he hadn't come into the house and his dinner was ready, and he hadn't acted out those familiar little rites that no-one notices until they are gone: coat, warm, smelling of Melbourne autumn and coffee-dense cafés, and hung on the back of the chair; Melbourne Herald, a reasonably respectable broadsheet, folded rustling onto the table like a placemat you could read, which in my father's case was not a simile; kettle on.

There was a certain presence of mind in her call - she hadn't asked me to find him; she was subconsciously wondering if the hallucinations of the aged, assisted by the tapping of an overgrown climber against a window and the screen door rattling against the westerly wind can trump failing memory. Yes, I said, hallucination will trump anyone - let alone a 95-year-old who has lived in a house since 1952, with a family growing to a peak of eight in 1968 and dwindling gradually into the early 1990s, and alone ever since.

Then I told her he - my father - had died in 1992. She seemed relieved.