Today, there seem to be no helicopters. The three days since they have been flying grid pattern overhead. I have called the police, and offered my services in the ground search. I have lain awake at night, listening to the lone night-bird whose call I don’t know. I feel pity, and sometimes, panic.

There’s a woman lost in the bushland that borders the mountain suburb in which I live (village really, but that word sounds too English for the pale, dry, unfriendly wilderness that abuts our wilting gardens, our roads from which dust rises in clouds behind the emergency vehicles heading into the reservoir land or the park).

She’s 77, the woman who’s lost. She’s a distant neighbour. I will have seen her at the Rural Fire Service  meeting for residents the last time we had a fire emergency. She would have been sitting on one of those chairs at the front thoughtfully placed for the comfort of the elderly. At other times we might have passed one another on our daily walks, skirting the border between town and the restricted area — the bushland managed by Sydney Water where signs warn walkers that anyone found there will be fined $10,000.

Four days ago she went out for her walk and somehow got lost. The police had one call from her — she could hear the helicopters, she said. But the helicopters couldn’t see her. After that call, her phone battery died. I learn this from the two policemen who are doing a door-to-door in the neighbourhood. It’s late, they say, so they’re doing this instead of the helicopter search. What about sniffer dogs? What about FLIR imaging? I think, but don’t ask these questions. After they have gone, I realise what they meant by late — not late in the day, but too late for her.

The Facebook page for the search is full of the usual kind comments. Hopes. Prayers. Among these, comments from people who knew her — and the route she would take on her solo walks. One neighbour wishes something had been done before, when she used to get lost on a regular basis and ‘we…raced around the neighbourhood looking for her’. Of all the posts this has the most replies. A brief debate about whether it is better to preserve an elderly demented person’s quality of life, and autonomy, or to ensure their safety. The debate is cut off by a reminder that it’s neither the time nor the place for that conversation. All true, it being late, as the policeman said.

The search has moved south-east — toward Narrow Neck and the canyon walls — and I can no longer hear the busy helicopters. Even now, seven days later, they’re still looking, the line of searchers having heard someone call to them: heard the voice, but not been able to tell where it came from.

I don’t like thinking about any of this. And I don’t much like writing about it. But the lost elderly woman, that confused wandering over familiar places become unfamiliar strikes too strong a chord. For I’ve got my own lost woman, though her disappearance is much less dramatic. She was taken from her villa in the retirement facility, wandering, confused, from room to room — looking for her own house from inside it. She is single, and elderly, and childless, so the staff in the hospital — then the respite care home — then the rest home — then another rest home — don’t know what to do with her. We, her nieces and nephews, don’t know what to do with her either, and when we do, no-one listens. So we do what we can. We visit.

When I visit I ask her if she needs anything from the villa (her room in the home is bare and impersonal: there is no part of the person inhabiting it other than the  woman sitting in the armchair by the bed). In a tiny high voice she says the villa is no longer hers. ‘This — all this,’ she says, gesturing around her at the empty room, ‘is mine.’

So I suggest things she might like from the villa. Bra, panties, the book of crosswords. The magnifying glass. More soap. Moisturiser? To everything she whispers, ‘no.’ I have been there all of five minutes when she says it would be better if I leave. ‘Better for you?’ I ask, and finally get a yes. I walk out past the nurses station. There is a heated discussion going on behind the partly closed door. Someone saying it’s all under review. Give it a month. I’m determined to make this the best elderly care facility in the region. I head out to the car park past the unattended reception desk.

I think she asked me to leave because it’s easier to disappear when no one is watching you do it.

The following day I bring in some things for her. Put the clothes in her drawers, the toiletries in the shelves over the sink. Within easy reach on the wheeled table by her armchair I put a tub of moisturiser and the little clock she keeps beside her bed in the villa. She’s hungry all the time, and now she’ll be able to see when to expect morning tea, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner.

‘I used to have one just like that,’ she says, giving the clock a quick, dispassionate look.

‘It’s your clock Aunty Shona,’ I say, ‘I got from the villa.’

She looks puzzled. The villa is lost, and everything in it. She lost it even as she walked around it, looking for it. She lost it when she started to lock the door against visitors; when her suspicions about everyone around her hardened (she’d left notes to herself in a handbag: ‘don’t talk to them. Don’t engage.’) Now she is rationing herself, in that room in the rest home.

When I visit I look for her in that set, tired, blank face. I look and don’t find her.