‘Dad!’ (This is my missus, yelling up the stairs.) ‘You been on Amazon again?’

Mind, Frieda’s Dad used to be sharp as a tack. Worked for a bookie till the bookie retired, then he got hisself a job with a betting shop up Turnpike Lane, stayed on there till Frieda’s Mum died. Frieda reckons that’s when it kicked off. He was never the same again after her Mum died.

Anyway, there he is at the top of the stairs, looking down, doin’ up his flies. ‘What?’ he says.

‘I said have you been on Amazon again?’ Frieda says.

‘Wait a minute,’ he says, scratching his head like this. ‘It’ll come back. I know, I was on PayPal. That’s it. I ordered some toothface. We was out of toothface.’

‘No we weren’t,’ Frieda says. ‘There’s another tube in the cabinet if you looked. Anyway you don’t need to go on Amazon for toothpaste.’

‘I was on PayPal,’ he says.

‘You were on Amazon,’ she says, ‘and you ordered a self-assembly plastic dog kennel.’

He frowned, that way he’s got, like his lightning mind has spotted something everybody else has missed. ‘That’s not right,’ he says. ‘It’s supposed to be toothface. You’ll have to send it back.’

It come on gradual at first. You don’t hardly notice. Then come the day we had to go down to Lewisham to bring him back from the nick down there. How the hell he managed to get hisself down to Lewisham I do not know. He didn’t neither. Well, he wouldn’t, would he?

‘I must’ve gone a-whatsit,’ he said.

‘Gone astray?’ Frieda said.

I said, ‘Where were you trying to get to?’

He shook his head. ‘Gone a-whatsit,’ he said. ‘Must ’ave. It’s the only excamation.’

So anyway, that was it. We couldn’t leave him up at Edmonton all on his jack, not after that, so we got him to move in with us, in Lorna’s old room.

And that was a laugh a minute. He used to like watching the racing on the telly, but he couldn’t bear to see the finish. When you think about it, if you’re a bookie you got a horse in every race. Well, you got the whole blooming pack in, one way or another. I can see how the finish could be agony for a bookie. He’d watch it till they come into the home stretch, then he’d turn his head aside and screw his face up and hold his hand up in front of him to block the screen. It was comic to watch. Sometimes we used to copy him and all do it. He thought that was hilarious.

After the dog kennel we turned off one-click, and made sure we always logged out. He still used to go there and it didn’t seem to worry him that he couldn’t manage to order nothing. He was happy just having a go at it.

We couldn’t always be there to keep an eye on him but we reckoned there wasn’t no harm as long as we was logged out of everything. Then one evening I found Frieda at the Acer and I asked her what she was doing. She give a little jump and looked funny, then she said she was just cleaning up after him. She’d never said nothing, but it seems she’d been doing it for some time. Every evening she’d go to My Downloads and wipe out anything he’d put there. I looked over her shoulder, and you could see why. ‘I was just looking,’ she says, ‘to see what he’d been downloading.’ ‘Well, I’m ready for bed,’ I says, ‘so hurry up and delete it. Hang on though, let’s just see the end.’

That got me worried. Some of them sites you got to click on to say you’re over 18. I told Frieda, I said to her, there ought to be another one to say you’re under 78, I said. He’s not fit to be let loose, I said. You don’t know where he’s going.

‘He can’t do nothing on Amazon,’ Frieda says.

‘I’m not worried about Amazon,’ I says. ‘There’s sites out there, one click and you’re downloading a virus, then the next thing you know they got your NatWest account.’

‘Oh, you and your NatWest account,’ she says.

But I was right, and she had to admit it. So after that we got Lorna to come round and fix it so you had to log in with a password. Frieda was worried about that. She thought it would upset him, not being able to get in. Not a bit of it. We explained you needed the password, and he just nodded. Never even asked what the password was. But ever after that you’d see him sitting there typing things in with one finger. You could leave him for half an hour on end trying to find the password, happy as a sandboy. I told Frieda, I reckoned he could get hisself a job, making up really hard passwords for people.

He wasn’t really a well man. I don’t mean what was left of his mind. He seemed happy enough. No, he had chest problems. Well, he had prostate problems and he had knee problems and problems with his ticker and all sorts really, but especially chest problems. He used to say he had digestive disorder. We reckoned he meant congestive, although Frieda said he had the other as well. He could get through a packet of digestives in half an hour. She took to hiding them. He’d be poking around all over the house. ‘Seen them biscuits, Frieda?’ he’d say.

No, it was his chest. They give him a oxygen cylinder but when it come on you couldn’t get him to use the oxygen. He’d stagger over to the window and stand there clutching the curtains and gasping. We’d try to get him to sit down and use the oxygen, but he’d say, ‘I gotta ’ave air, I gotta ’ave air.’ It was pitiful to watch really. He’d get into a panic. He didn’t seem to realise the windows wasn’t even open.

Sometimes you could get him to calm down but sometimes you couldn’t, and a couple of times he ended up in A & E. But the best thing, if he got into that state, was just to call the doctor. All he needed really was to calm down. He didn’t mind what he said when it was just me and Frieda but with the doctor or anybody like that he didn’t like to make a fuss. As soon as he saw the doctor he’d calm down. One moment he’d be flailing around with his arms and saying, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe,’ and then there’d be the door bell and the doctor would come in and squat down beside him and say, ‘How are you feeling, Mr Taylor?’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, not too bad,’ and that was it, he’d settle down and it was all over.

Well, then come the day that it was all over. We had the doctor there and he’d calmed him down and listened to his chest and done his blood pressure and that, and he’d packed his things up and give him a lecture on using the oxygen if he had another turn, and the old man nodded and the doctor had just got up and turned away when he give a sort of hiccup and he was gone. Just like that.

Frieda was well upset, of course. What made it worse for her was the thought that she couldn’t give him a proper send-off. The thing is, he’d told us he didn’t want no funeral. When Frieda’s Mum passed away he’d been shocked at how much it cost. Then somebody, Wilf Pickering I think it was, told him you could donate your body to medical science, and they took care of everything. They came and took the body away and that was it. Spared the family all the fuss and all the organization and the cost and everything. Only you had to set it up in advance.

So that was what he’d done, he said. We wouldn’t have to see to a thing. He’d signed up to donate hisself to medical science.

I might have known. We got on to them and they said they didn’t know nothing about it. You must do, I says. This is serious, I says, you can’t just leave him here.

Well, it took them a couple of hours but they got back to us in the end. Seems he hadn’t donated hisself to medical science after all.

No, the blighter had gone and donated me.

I shall have a word to say to him if I ever run into him again.