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the present,” he said. “It’s usually the only place in which you can get anything worthwhile done.”
    I still like to think about that sometimes. The entire human race—all of us—warriors of the present, every moment turning liquid future into solid past.

    At first Granny Deedee was raging with Granddad about my horse. She asked him whether he had “utterly lost” his “marbles” and said that at the very least he should have consulted her. But he kept telling her that everything was going to be fine, and for a good while she kept believing him. We both did.

    I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it already, but the reason I had to move in with my grandparents was that my mum had to go to Sydney. It was something to do with how the market had dried up over here.
    â€œAt least she has her mobile phone,” my gran had said cheerfully, just after Mum left. And I’d said, “Yeah, great, thank goodness for that.”
    Every time Mum called to say hi, I told Gran to let her know that I was a hundred percent fine. Gran would say, “Sweetheart, why don’t you tell her yourself?” holding the phone out toward me like it was some kind of weapon. But I was usually too busy, to be perfectly honest. And anyway, you’re rarely in the mood to talk to a person who goes off to Sydney when there are still loads of people over here who’d have found it sort of handy if she’d stayed where she was.
    I don’t mean to be nasty or anything, but I had begun tothink that my mum wasn’t really a proper parent. Not only had she given me a fairly stupid name, she had also left me to cope with a lot of things that I shouldn’t have had to deal with at all. I was only a kid. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t pack my bags and say I was leaving, however much I would have liked to. You don’t take off like that just because times have gotten a bit rough. I happen to believe that when you have responsibilities, you should stick around.

    I would have much preferred to keep my granddad’s memory problems to myself, but it turns out that the guy I’d met at the train station was in my school. He told some of the people in my class about what he’d seen my granddad doing, and then those guys went around saying that my granddad was a psycho. They told everyone that he talked to lampposts and peed in public, which was true, but it sounded a lot worse the way they said it.
    And then the whole entire school seemed to be in on the news that my granddad was a proper mental case, which was getting more and more difficult to disagree with.
    You’d think that having a mental granddad might make people want to be slightly nice to you once in a while, but it doesn’t work like that. D. J. Burke started to call me “Loser Boy.” It’s not like I cared what anyone thought about me—it was just that “Loser Boy” happens to be exactly the kind of name that is quite hard to get rid of, especially when D. J. Burke starts calling you it.
    â€œDon’t give him any oxygen,” Granny Deedee said when I decided to tell her about it one night.
    â€œDee, that’s the most ineffective advice you can give a boy in those kinds of circumstances,” said Granddad.
    I was thrilled. More proof that my granddad’s brain was still working fine.
    Granddad took me by the shoulders and looked at me with a load of focus and enthusiasm, and he said, “Bring that boy to the ground with all the energy you have. Stand on his chest and point your shoe toward his chin, and tell him that your will is greater than his. Keep him on the ground like that until he agrees not to call you names anymore. That should do the trick.”
    After my granddad was in bed, Gran said that I was not for a moment to consider taking that advice, and she explained that Granddad hadn’t really been himself when he’d given it to me. I said that