Copyright

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Ciara Geraghty 2019

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover illustration © Andrew Davidson/The Artworks

Chapter-heading lines taken from Rules of the Road RSA Rule Book © March 2015

Reprinted by permission of the Road Safety Authority

Ciara Geraghty asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008320676

Ebook Edition © May 2019 ISBN: 9780008320683

Version: 2019-04-01

Dedication

For my mother, Breda

who gave me roots to grow.

And wings to fly.

Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: Signal your intent.

Chapter 2: You must always be aware of your speed and judge the appropriate speed for your vehicle.

Chapter 3: Don’t move from one traffic lane to another without good reason.

Chapter 4: Bumps on the road.

Chapter 5: You must not park in any way which interferes with the normal flow of traffic.

Chapter 6: If you are approaching a junction with a major road, you must yield.

Chapter 7: Before you start your journey, you should plan where you will stop to rest.

Chapter 8: Make sure your vehicle is roadworthy.

Chapter 9: Expect the unexpected.

Chapter 10: Be particularly careful of features that may hinder your view of the road ahead.

Chapter 11: Always check your blind spot.

Chapter 12: You should check your mirrors regularly to observe what is going on behind your vehicle.

Chapter 13: Never drive if you are fighting sleep.

Chapter 14: Detours should be clearly marked to aid the flow of traffic.

Chapter 15: If you are towing another vehicle, make sure the tow bar is strong enough.

Chapter 16: Before you start to manoeuvre, you must exercise due care and attention.

Chapter 17: Even with the best headlights, you can see less at night than during the day.

Chapter 18: It is advisable to drive your vehicle in a defensive manner. Be prepared to stop, sound the horn and brake.

Chapter 19: Tired drivers are a major road safety risk.

Chapter 20: If you approach a Stop sign, you must stop completely.

Chapter 21: You should always take the prevailing road conditions into account.

Chapter 22: Drivers are expected to have the ability to foresee and react to hazards.

Chapter 23: What to do if you are dazzled by another vehicle’s headlights: Slow down and stop if necessary.

Chapter 24: When approaching a toll, reduce your speed appropriately.

Chapter 25: Avoid using personal entertainment systems which can distract you, and may prove dangerous.

Chapter 26: If another driver is attempting to provoke you, don’t react.

Chapter 27: If you find yourself driving against the flow of traffic, pull in immediately to the hard shoulder and stop.

Chapter 28: Your vehicle must have mirrors fitted so that you always know what is behind and to each side.

Chapter 29: On the motorway, you must only drive ahead. No turning or reversing is permitted.

Chapter 30: Signal your intention to change course and pull in.

Chapter 31: Motor vehicles must be tested for their roadworthiness.

Chapter 32: Be alert in case the overtaking vehicle suddenly pulls back in front of you.

Chapter 33: Diverging traffic ahead.

Chapter 34: Yield right of way.

Epilogue

About the Author

Also by Ciara Geraghty

About the Publisher

1
SIGNAL YOUR INTENT.

Iris Armstrong is missing.

That is to say, she is not where she is supposed to be.

I am trying not to worry. After all, Iris is a grown woman and can take care of herself better than most.

It’s true to say that I am a worrier. Ask my girls. Ask my husband. They’ll tell you that I’d worry if I had nothing to worry about. Which is, of course, an exaggeration, although I suppose it’s true to say that, if I had nothing to worry about, I might feel that I had overlooked something.

Iris is the type of woman who tells you what she intends to do and then goes ahead and does it. Today is her birthday. Her fifty-eighth.

‘People see birthdays as an opportunity to tell women they look great for their age,’ Iris says when I suggested that we celebrate it.

It’s true that Iris looks great for her age. I don’t say that. Instead, I say, ‘We should celebrate nonetheless.’

‘I’ll celebrate by doing the swan. Or the downward-facing dog. Something animalistic,’ said Iris after she told me about the yoga retreat she had booked herself into.

‘But you hate yoga,’ I said.

‘I thought you’d be delighted. You’re always telling me how good yoga is for people with MS.’

My plan today was to visit Dad, then ring the yoga retreat in Wicklow to let them know I’m driving down with a birthday cake for Iris. So they’ll know it’s her birthday. Iris won’t want a fuss of course, but everyone should have cake on their birthday.

But when I arrive at Sunnyside Nursing Home, my father is sitting in the reception area with one of the managers. On the floor beside his chair is his old suitcase, perhaps a little shabby around the edges now but functional all the same.

A week, the manager says. That’s how long it will take for the exterminators to do what they need to do, apparently. Vermin, he calls them, by which I presume he means rats, because if it was just mice, he’d say mice, wouldn’t he?

My father lives in a rat-infested old folk’s home where he colours in between the lines and loses at bingo and sings songs and waits for my mother to come back from the shops soon.

‘I can transfer your father to one of our other facilities, if you’d prefer,’ the manager offers.

‘No, I’ll take him,’ I say. It’s the least I can do. I thought I could look after him myself, at home, like my mother did for years. I thought I could cope. Six months I lasted. Before I had to put him into Sunnyside.

I put Dad’s suitcase into the boot beside the birthday cake. I’ve used blue icing for the sea, grey for the rocks where I’ve perched an icing-stick figure which is supposed to be Iris, who swims at High Rock every day of the year. Even in November. Even in February. She swims like it’s July. Every day. I think she’ll get a kick out of the cake. It took me ages to finish it. Much longer than the recipe book suggested. Brendan says it’s because I’m too careful. The cake does not look like it’s been made by someone who is too careful. There is a precarious slant to it, as if it’s been subjected to adverse weather conditions.

I belt Dad into the passenger seat.

‘Where is your mother?’ he asks.

‘She’ll be back from the shops soon,’ I say. I’ve stopped telling him that she’s dead. He gets too upset, every time. The grief on his face is so fresh, so vivid, it feels like my grief, all over again, and I have to look away, close my eyes, dig my nails into the fleshy part of my hands.

I get into the car, turn over the engine.

‘Signal your intent,’ Dad says, in that automatic way he does when he recites the rules of the road. He remembers all of them. There must be some cordoned-off areas in your brain where dementia cannot reach.

I indicate as instructed, then ring the yoga retreat before driving off.

But Iris is not there.

She never arrived.

In fact, according to the receptionist who speaks in the calm tones of someone who practises yoga every day, there is no record of a booking for an Iris Armstrong.

Iris told me not to ring her mobile this week. It would be turned off.

I ring her mobile.

It’s turned off.

I drive to Iris’s cottage in Feltrim. The curtains are drawn across every window. It looks just the way it should; like the house of a woman who has gone away. I pull into the driveway that used to accommodate her ancient Jaguar. Her sight came back almost immediately after the accident, and the only damage was to the lamp post that Iris crashed into, but her consultant couldn’t guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again. Iris says she doesn’t miss the car, but she asked me if I would hand over the keys to the man who bought it off her. She said she had a meeting she couldn’t get out of.

‘It’s just a car,’ she said, ‘and the local taxi driver looks like Daniel Craig. And he doesn’t talk during sex, and knows every rat run in the city.’

‘I’ll just be a minute, Dad,’ I tell him, opening my car door.

‘Take your time, love,’ he says. He never used to call me love.

The grass in the front garden has benefitted from a recent mow. I stand at the front door, ring the bell. Nobody answers. I cast about the garden. It’s May. The cherry blossom, whose branches last week were swollen with buds, is now a riot of pale pink flowers. The delicacy of their beauty is disarming, but also sad, how soon the petals will be discarded, strewn across the grass in a week or so, like wet and muddy confetti in a church courtyard long after the bride and groom have left.

I rap on the door even though I’m almost positive Iris isn’t inside.

Where is she?

I ring the Alzheimer’s Society, ask to be put through to Iris’s office, but the receptionist tells me what I already know. That Iris is away on a week’s holiday.

‘Is that you, Terry?’ she asks and there is confusion in her voice; she is wondering why I don’t already know this.

‘Eh, yes Rita, sorry, don’t mind me, I forgot.’

Suddenly I am flooded with the notion that Iris is inside the house. She has fallen. That must be it. She has fallen and is unconscious at the foot of the stairs. She might have been there for ages. Days maybe. This worry is a galvanising one. Not all worries fall into this category. Some render me speechless. Or stationary. The wooden door at the entrance to the side passage is locked, so I haul the wheelie bin over, grip the sides of it, and hoist myself onto the lid. People think height is an advantage, but I have never found mine – five feet ten inches, or 1.778 metres, I should say – to be so. Imperial or metric, the fact is I am too tall to be kneeling on the lid of a wheelie bin. I am a myriad of arms and elbows and knees. It’s difficult to know where to put everything.

I grip the top of the door, sort of haul myself over the top, graze my knee against the wall, and hesitate, but only for a moment, before lowering myself down as far as I can before letting go, landing in a heap in the side passage. I should be fitter than this. The girls are always on at me to take up this or that. Swimming or running or pilates. Get you out of the house. Get you doing something.

The shed in Iris’s back garden has been treated to a clear-out; inside, garden tools hang on hooks along one wall, the hose coiled neatly in a corner and the half-empty paint tins – sealed shut with rust years ago – are gone. It’s true that I advised her to dispose of them – carefully – given the fire hazard they present. Still, I can’t believe that she actually went ahead and did it.

Even the small window on the gable wall of the shed is no longer a mesh of web. Through it, I see a square of pale-blue sky.

The spare key is in an upside-down plant pot in the shed, in spite of my concerns about the danger of lax security about the homestead.

I return to the driveway and check on Dad. He is still there, still in the front passenger seat, singing along to the Frank Sinatra CD I put on for him. Strangers in the Night.

I unlock the front door. The house feels empty. There is a stillness.

‘Iris?’ My voice is loud in the quiet, my breath catching the dust motes, so that they lift and swirl in the dead air.

I walk through the hallway, towards the kitchen. The walls are cluttered with black-and-white photographs in wooden frames. A face in each, mostly elderly. All of them have passed through the Alzheimer’s Society and when they do, Iris asks if she can take their photograph.

My father’s photograph hangs at the end of the hallway. There is a light in his eyes that might be the sunlight glancing through the front door. A trace of his handsomeness still there across the fine bones of his face framed by the neat helmet of his white hair, thicker then.

He looks happy. No, it’s more than that. He looks present.

‘Iris?’

The kitchen door moans when I open it. A squirt of WD40 on the hinges would remedy that.

A chemical, lemon smell. If I didn’t know any better, I would suspect a cleaning product. The surfaces are clear. Bare. So too is the kitchen table, which is where Iris spreads her books, her piles of paperwork, sometimes the contents of her handbag when she is hunting for something. The table is solid oak. I have eaten here many times, and have rarely seen its surface. It would benefit from a sand and varnish.

In the sitting room, the curtains are drawn and the cushions on the couch look as though they’ve been plumped, a look which would be unremarkable in my house, but is immediately noticeable in Iris’s. Iris loves that couch. She sometimes sleeps on it. I know that because I called in once, early in the morning. She wasn’t expecting me. Iris is the only person in the world I would call into without ringing first. She put on the kettle when I arrived. Made a pot of strong coffee. It was the end of Dad’s first week in the home.

She said she’d fallen asleep on the couch, when she saw me looking at the blankets and pillows strewn across it. She said she’d fallen asleep watching The Exorcist.

But I don’t think that’s why she slept on the couch. I think it’s to do with the stairs. Sometimes I see her, at the Alzheimer’s offices, negotiating the stairs with her crutches. The sticks, she calls them. She hates waiting for the lift. And she makes it look easy, climbing the stairs. But it can’t be easy, can it?

Besides, who falls asleep watching The Exorcist?

‘Iris?’ I hear an edge of panic in my voice. It’s not that anything is wrong exactly. Or out of place.

Except that’s it. There’s nothing out of place. Everything has been put away.

I walk up the stairs. More photographs on the landing, the bedroom doors all closed. I knock on the door of Iris’s bedroom. ‘Iris?’ There is no answer. I open the door. The room is dark. I make out the silhouette of Iris’s bed and, as my eyes adapt to the compromised light, I see that the bed has been stripped, the pillows arranged in two neat stacks by the headboard. There are no books on the night-stand. Maybe she took them with her. To the yoga retreat.

But she is not at the yoga retreat.

Panic is like a taste at the back of my throat. The wardrobe door, which usually hangs open in protest at the mêlée of clothing inside, is shut. The floorboards creak beneath my weight. I stretch my hand out, reach for the handle, and then sort of yank it open as if I am not frightened of what might be inside.

There is nothing inside. In the draught, empty hangers sway against each other, making a melancholy sound. I close the door and open the drawers of the tallboy on the other side of the room.

Empty. All of them.

In the bathroom there is no toothbrush lying on its side on the edge of the sink, spooling a puddle of toothpaste.

There are no damp towels draped across the rim of the bath. The potted plants – which flourish here in the steam – are gone.

I hear a car horn blaring, and rush into the spare room, which Iris uses as her home office. Jerk open the blinds, peer at the driveway below. My car is still there. And so is Dad. I see his mouth moving as he sings along. I rap at the window, but he doesn’t look up. When I turn around, I notice a row of black bin bags, neatly tied at the top with twine, leaning against the far wall. They are tagged, with the name of Iris’s local charity shop.

Now panic travels from my mouth down my throat into my chest, expands there until it’s difficult to breathe. I try to visualise my breath, as Dr Martin suggests. Try to see the shape it takes in a brown paper bag when I breathe into one.

I pull Iris’s chair out from under her desk, lower myself onto it. Even the paperclips have been tidied into an old earring box. I pick up two paperclips and attach them together. Good to have something to do with my hands. I reach for a third when I hear a high plink that nearly lifts me out of the chair. I think it came from Iris’s laptop, closed on the desk. An incoming mail or a tweet or something. I should turn it off. It’s a fire hazard. A plugged-in computer. I lift the lid of the laptop. On the screen, what looks like a booking form. An Irish Ferries booking form. On top of the keyboard are two white envelopes, warm to the touch. Iris’s large, flamboyant handwriting is unmistakable on both.

One reads Vera Armstrong. Her mother’s name.

The second envelope is addressed to me.

2
YOU MUST ALWAYS BE AWARE OF YOUR SPEED AND JUDGE THE APPROPRIATE SPEED FOR YOUR VEHICLE.

‘The speed limit on a regional road is eighty kilometres per hour,’ Dad says.

‘Sorry, I’m … in a hurry.’ I glance in the rear-view mirror. I think I hear sirens, but I see no police cars behind me.

In my peripheral vision, Iris’s letter, in a crumpled ball at the top of my handbag.

My dearest Terry,

The first thing you should know is there was nothing you could have done. My mind was made up.

Panic is spinning my thoughts around and around, faster and faster, until it’s difficult to make out individual ones.

‘Did I ever tell you about the time I had Frank Sinatra in the taxi?’ says Dad.

‘No.’ Most of my conversations with my father are crippled with lies.

‘It was a Friday night, and I was driving down Harcourt Street. The traffic was terrible because of the … the stuff … the water …’

‘Rain?’

‘Yes, rain and …’

The second thing you should know is there was nothing you could have done. My mind was made up.

The lights are red and I jerk to a stop. The brakes screech. The car is due for an NCT next month. I need to get it serviced before then. Brendan says I should get a new one. A little run-around, he says. Something easier to park. But I like the heft of the Volvo. It’s true that it’s nearing its sell-by date. Maybe even past it. But I feel safe inside it. And it’s never let me down.

‘… and I said to Frank I know the words to all your songs and …’

… but please know that this is a decision I have come to after a long, thorough thought process and I do not and will not regret it.

I’ve never been to Dublin Port before. I park in a disabled spot. I have no permit to do so.

‘Dad, will you stay here? I have to … I have to do something.’

‘Of course, love, no problem.’

‘Promise me you won’t get out of the car?’

‘Are you going to pick up your mother?’

‘Swear you’ll stay here ’til I get back.’

… and perhaps it is too much for me to ask; that you understand my choice, but I hope you do because your opinion is important to me and …

My father looks at me with curiosity as if he’s trying to work out who I am, and perhaps he is. It is sometimes difficult to tell what he knows for sure and what he pretends to remember.

I bend towards him, put my hand on his shoulder. ‘I’ll be back soon, okay?’

He smiles a gappy smile, which means he’s taken out his dentures again. Last time I found them inside one of Anna’s old trainers in the boot.

‘You’ll be back soon,’ he says, and I tell him I will, and close the door and lock him into the car.

… practical arrangements have been taken care of with the clinic in Switzerland and are enclosed for your …

If the car catches fire, he won’t be able to get out. He’ll be burned alive. Or suffocated with the smoke. But the car has never caught fire, so why would it today? Of all days? I hesitate. Brendan would call it dithering.

… only a matter of time before that happens, which is why it needs to be now, before I am no longer able to …

I run through the car park, towards the terminal building. I try not to think about anything. Instead, I concentrate on the sound of my soles thumping against the ground, the sound of my breath, hot and strained, the sound of my heart, thumping in my chest like a fist.

My dearest Terry,

The first thing you should know is …

I spot Iris immediately. She’s easy to spot even though she’s not all that tall. She seems taller than she is.

The relief is palpable. Solid as a wall. She’s in a queue, doing her best to wait her turn. She does not look like a woman who is planning to end her life in a clinic in Switzerland. She looks like her usual self. Her steel-grey hair cropped close to her scalp, no make-up, no jewellery, no nonsense. It’s only when the queue shuffles forward, you notice the crutches, and still, after all this time, they seem so peculiar in her big, capable hands. So unnecessary.

I stand for a moment and stare at her. My first thought is that Iris was wrong. There is something I can do. What that something is, I haven’t worked out yet. But the fact that I’m here. That’s she’s still here. I haven’t missed her. It’s a Sign, isn’t it?

The relief is so huge, so insistent, there’s no room for any other feeling in my head. I’m full to the brim with it. I’m choking on it. My voice sounds strange when I call her name.

‘Iris.’ She can’t hear me over the crowd.

I walk nearer. ‘Iris?’

‘IRIS!’ Heads turn towards me, and I can feel my face flooding with heat. I concentrate on Iris, who turns her face towards me, her wide, green eyes fastening on me.

‘Terry? What the fuck are you doing here?’

Iris’s propensity to curse was the only thing my mother did not like about her.

My mouth is dry and the relief has deserted me and my body is pounding with … I don’t know … adrenalin maybe. Or fear. I feel cold all of a sudden. Clammy. I step closer. Open my mouth. What I say next is important. It might be the most important thing I’ve ever said, except I can’t think of anything. Not a single thing. Not one word. Instead, I rummage in my handbag, pull out her letter, do my best to smooth it so she’ll recognise it. So she’ll know. I hold it up.

When Iris sees the page, she sort of freezes so that, when the queue shuffles forward, she does not move, and the person behind – engrossed in his phone – walks into the back of her.

‘Oh, sorry,’ he says. Iris doesn’t glare at him. She doesn’t even look at him, as if she hasn’t noticed his intrusion into her personal space, another of her pet hates. Instead, she nudges her luggage – an overnight bag – along the floor with a crutch, then follows it.

I stand there, holding the creased page.

People stare.

I lower my hand, walk towards her.

‘What are you doing?’ I hiss at her.

She won’t look at me. ‘You know what I’m doing. You read my note.’ She concentrates on the back of the man’s head in front of her. The collar of his suit jacket is destroyed with dandruff.

I fold my arms tightly across my chest, making fists of my hands to stop the shake of them. I should have thought more about what I was going to say. I don’t know what I thought about in the car. I don’t think I thought of anything. Except getting here.

And now I’m here, and I can’t think of what to say. Or do.

‘Iris,’ I finally manage. ‘Say something.’

‘I’ve explained everything in my letter.’ She looks straight ahead, as though she’s talking to someone in front of her. Not to me. People in the queue crane their necks to get their fill of us. ‘I’ve read it,’ I say, ‘and I’m none the wiser.’

‘I’m sorry, Terry.’ She lowers her head, her voice smaller now. A crack in her armour that I might be able to prise open.

I put my hand on her arm. ‘It’s okay, Iris. It’s going to be okay. We’ll just get into my car. I’m parked right outside. Dad’s in the car by himself so we need to …’

‘Your dad? Why is he here?’

‘There’re rats. In Sunnyside. Well … vermin, which I took to mean … but look, I’ll tell you about it in the car, okay?’

‘How did you know I’d be here?’ Iris says.

‘I saw the booking form. On your computer.’

‘You hacked into my laptop?’

‘Of course not! You left your computer on, which, by the way, is a fire hazard. Not to mention the security risk of not having a password.’

‘You broke into my house?’

‘No! I used the key you keep in the …’ I lower my voice ‘… shed.’

The queue shuffles forward, and Iris prods her bag with her stick, follows it. She is nearly at the head now.

‘Iris,’ I call after her, ‘come on.’

‘I’m sorry, Terry,’ she says again, looking at me. ‘I’m taking this boat.’ Her voice is filled with the kind of clarity nobody argues with. I’ve seen her in action. At various committee meetings at the Alzheimer’s Society. That’s another thing she hates. Committees. She prefers deciding on a course of action and making it happen. That’s usually how it pans out.

I stand there, my hands dangling uselessly from the ends of my rigid, straight arms.

‘I am not going to allow you to do this,’ I say then.

‘Next,’ the man at the ticket office calls.

Iris bends to pick up her overnight bag. I see the tremor running like an electrical current down the length of her arm. I know better than to help. Anyway, why would I help? I’m here to hinder, not to help.

I’m not really a hinderer, as such.

Iris says I’m a facilitator, but really, I just go along with things. Try not to attract attention.

Iris hooks her bag onto the handle of the crutch, strides towards the man at the hatch. Even with her sticks, she strides.

I stumble after her.

‘I’m collecting a ticket,’ she says. ‘Iris Armstrong. To Holyhead.’

The man pecks at his keyboard with short, fat fingers. ‘One way?’ he asks.

Iris nods.

3
DON’T MOVE FROM ONE TRAFFIC LANE TO ANOTHER WITHOUT GOOD REASON.

I run outside. My father is still in the car. The car is not on fire. I fling open the door. He looks at me with his now familiar face; the one that is somehow vacant, like an abandoned house. Or a space where a house used to stand.

‘Dad, I …’ My voice is high and tight with fear. Crying seems inevitable. My brother called me a crybaby when we were kids.

‘Your mother should be back by now,’ he says. ‘She’s been gone a long time.’

I clear my throat. ‘She’ll be back soon,’ I say. I don’t have time for crying. I have to think.

THINK.

I could call the guards. Couldn’t I? I have Iris’s letter. That’s proof, isn’t it? But is it illegal? Iris’s plan? She’d never forgive me. But maybe she would, in the end. Maybe she’d be grateful I forced her hand?

I look at my watch. The boat leaves in an hour and a half.

THINK.

I ring home. I don’t know why. Nobody is there. But the ring tone, the sound of it ringing in my own home in Sutton, in the hallway that smells of the floor polish I used this morning, the phone ringing in its own familiar way, is a comfort to me.

In the early years, I did nothing but worry about the house. The lure that it represented to would-be burglars. The strain of the mortgage on Brendan’s salary. And on Brendan himself. I worried that he would end up like his father, who died a week before he retired from the building sites.

‘We can buy a smaller house,’ I said. ‘In Bayside maybe. They’re not as expensive there.’

But Brendan had already put the deposit down. It meant a lot to him, our address. He said I wouldn’t understand because I hadn’t grown up in a three-bed council house in Edenmore.

He told me not to worry.

I worried anyway.

The phone stops ringing. Then a click, and Brendan’s monotone. ‘We’re not in. Leave a message.’

‘You could sound a bit more …’ I said when he recorded the message.

‘A bit more what?’

‘Well … interested, I suppose.’

I don’t remember what he said to that. Nothing, I expect.

I hang up. Dad smiles at me and says, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time Frank Sin—’

‘Dad?’

‘Yes, love?’

‘What would you say if I told you we were going on a little trip?’ This is crazy. I can’t go. I have too much to do here. Too many responsibilities. Besides, I’ve got no change of clothes. Or even a toothbrush.

‘But what about your mother?’ Dad asks. ‘She has to come with us.’

I scan the front of the terminal building. Maybe Iris will come out? She seemed stunned when I left. She was probably expecting me to do something. What should I do?

THINK.

I can’t just get on a boat. What about Dad? And the girls? They’re both under pressure at the moment; Kate with her play debuting in Galway next week, and Anna, in the last year of her politics and philosophy course. Studying for her finals.

Brendan told me not to ring him at work unless it’s an emergency.

‘GoldStar Insurance, Brendan Shepherd’s office, Laura speaking, how may I help you?’

‘Oh, hello … I …’

‘Is that you, Mrs Shepherd?’

‘Well, yes, yes it is, I—’

‘I’m afraid Brendan is in a meeting and he—’

‘I’m … sorry, I don’t want to disturb him, but I need to … could you …’

‘Certainly, one moment please.’

‘Greensleeves’. It sounds soothing after the brisk efficiency of Laura Muldoon. She’s worked there for years. Brendan says he couldn’t manage without her. His right-hand woman he calls her.

A second round of ‘Greensleeves’, and still no sign of Iris. Part of me knows for a fact that she is on the boat. That’s what she said she was going to do, so it seems likely that that’s what she’s done. Still, I look for her at the main door of the building. Just in case.

‘Terry?’ Brendan sounds worried. ‘What is it? Is everything okay?’

‘Well, no, but, I—’ What to say, exactly?

‘Are the girls all right?’

‘Yes, yes, they’re fine, it’s just—’

‘I’m in the middle of an important meeting. The Canadians arrived this morning. Remember?’

‘Yes, of course.’ How could I have forgotten about the Canadians? Brendan has talked of little else but this takeover for months now. There’s talk of rationalisation. He’s worried about his staff. Losing their jobs.

‘Can you print out last week’s bordereaux on the financial services portfolios?’ Brendan asks.

‘Pardon?’ I say.

‘Sorry, I was talking to Laura there. Listen Terry, I’m going to have to—’

‘Wait.’

‘What is it?’ His impatience is almost tangible. I clear my throat.

‘Brendan. I need to talk to you. It’s about Iris.’

‘Iris?’ He wasn’t expecting that. I can’t blame him. Iris is not someone who usually warrants an emergency phone call.

‘Yes, Iris,’ I say, so there can be no doubt.

‘What about her?’ The urgency is gone from his tone. He thinks this is one of my worrying about nothing scenarios.

‘Well, she’s … talking about going to Switzerland. She says she’s going to a place where she can … it’s a clinic. In Zurich. They help you to … you know … end your life.’

‘What?’

‘Iris is going to Swi—’

‘No, Jesus, I heard what you said, I just … what the hell is she doing that for?’

‘Well … she says it’s to do with her MS and—’

‘But there’s not a bother on her. She’s not even in a wheelchair.’

‘That’s why she wants to do it now, she says. While she still can.’

‘That makes no sense whatsoever.’

‘Look Brendan, there’s no time to explain. The boat is leaving in …’ I check my watch. ‘… an hour and a quarter, and—’

‘Boat? What boat?’

‘The boat to Holyhead.’ It was a mistake. Ringing Brendan.

‘But she’s going to Zurich, you said. Why would she—’

‘She doesn’t fly. You know that.’

Brendan makes a sort of snorting noise down the phone. ‘So she’s going to kill herself, but she’s taking the boat just in case the plane crashes? Jesus, even for Iris, that’s crazy.’

‘Don’t say that, it’s—’

The sound of a foghorn wails through the air, startling me.

‘Where are you, Terry?’

‘I’m … I’m at Dublin Port.’

‘What are you … Jesus Christ, you’re not thinking of going with her, are you?’

‘Of course not. I mean, probably definitely not. It’s just … she’s by herself and …’

Crackling on the line now, then a door – Brendan’s office door – being firmly closed. When he speaks again, his voice is louder. Clearer. As if he is pressing the receiver hard against the side of his face.

‘Terry, listen to me now. She’s not going to go through with it. This is one of her notions. Like that time she said she was going to trek through the Sahara Desert.’

‘She did trek through the Sahara Desert.’

Brendan pauses, takes a deep breath.

‘Look, Terry, you’re needed here. Work is crazy at the moment with the Canadians landing. And there’s Kate. We need to be in Galway for her play next week.’

‘I know that, but—’

‘And what about Anna? She gets so stressed at exam time. And these are her finals.’ I want to tell him I know all that. I am her mother. These are the things I know. Like Anna being stressed and her skin being bad. I’m positive she’s not applying the cream I got for her eczema as regularly as she’s supposed to.

‘The best thing to do is go home, Terry. I won’t work late tonight. I’ll do my best to be home in time for dinner. We can talk about it then.’

I picture Brendan, arriving home from a hard day at the office and no dinner on the table and the washing still hanging on the line in the back garden. Anna brought a week’s worth over yesterday, and I promised her I’d …

THINK.

I think about Iris.

Say I went.

I can’t go.

But say I did.

Could I persuade Iris to change her mind? I’ve never persuaded anyone to do anything. I couldn’t even talk Brendan out of having the vasectomy after Anna was born.

‘Terry? Terry? Are you there?’ I hear the bristle in his voice, straining to get back to his important meeting.

‘Yes.’

‘So I’ll see you tonight?’

‘Well, I …’

‘Terry, this is nonsensical.’

‘I have to go.’ I hang up.

I’ve never hung up on Brendan. Ever. It’s true that we rarely communicate by telephone, but still, I’ve always held a civil tongue in my head and allowed him to finish his sentences and said my goodbyes before disconnecting the call.

Outside the terminal building, people stand and smoke or punch buttons on their phones or search for something in their handbags or stare into the middle distance.

There is no sign of Iris. The boat is leaving in – I check my watch – seventy minutes. And you have to check in thirty minutes before departure. Giving me forty minutes to come up with something.

THINK.

Everything Brendan said is true. Apart from Iris having notions. Iris has plans, not notions.

‘Do you think your mother will be back soon?’ I look at Dad. Without his dentures, his cheeks are hollow. He looks old. And cold. And so thin. When did he get so thin?

‘Yes,’ I say. I wish it were true. Mam would know what to do. She would have advice although she offered it only when it was sought. Even then, she maintained that people never really wanted advice, just someone to listen to them.

I think about Iris, sitting on the boat, her long fingers drumming the armrest of her chair, anxious to be off, regretful that things did not go according to plan. If they had, I would not have read her letter until next week, and by then, it would have been too late.

But it’s not too late.

Not yet.

THINK.

I ring Celia Murphy, my next-door neighbour, who has a key for our house. She gave me her front-door key, so I felt I had to reciprocate. I mind her cats when she goes to those juicing seminars in Scotland, and she gives us pears from her tree in the autumn, although none of us like pears. I stew them with ginger and brown sugar and put them in Tupperware containers in the freezer. The freezer is full of Tupperware containers of stewed pear. I don’t know why. My mother hated waste. Perhaps that’s it.

‘Celia? It’s Terry, I … No, nothing’s wrong, not a thing, sorry to disturb but, I … well, I need a favour and …’

Celia launches into a monologue about her cats, Fluffy and Flopsy. One of them is sick. I can’t make out which one. When she pauses for breath, I attempt to divert her.

‘Oh no Celia, I am sorry to hear that, hopefully the vet will …’

She’s off again. I grip the phone harder, dig it into my ear. ‘Listen Celia, sorry to interrupt, but I need your help. It’s urgent.’ I’m not quite shouting, but the silence that follows has a sort of stunned quality. I rush into it.

‘It’s just … well, I’m filling out paperwork for Dad and I need his passport. And eh, mine too. No, no, nothing serious, it’s just … just some paperwork, they’re always looking for something or other, these nursing homes. You’ll find them in the middle drawer of the sideboard in the dining room. Could you … Oh that’s great. Thank you. No no, there’s no need for you to bring them to the nursing home. But you’re so kind to … I’ll … I’ve ordered a taxi to collect the passports. Yes. Yes, that’s what I’ve done, I’ll … Sorry Celia the line is bad, I’d better go, yes, bye, bye, bye, thanks, bye, bye, thanks, bye.’

I hang up. If I stop and think about what I’m doing, I won’t do it, so I don’t stop. I don’t think. I ring a taxi company in Sutton, tell the man who answers what I need. This is not the type of service they usually provide, the man tells me. I say I wouldn’t normally ask, but this is urgent. I assure him of my ability to pay. I do my best to seem like a person who doesn’t take no for an answer. I bombard him with details. Celia’s address, my mobile number, my bank card details. ‘How soon can one of your drivers be here?’

4
BUMPS ON THE ROAD.

There are speed bumps up the ramp to the ferry.

‘Oh dear,’ Dad says, when I drive over one. He is a bag of bones, rattling with each jolt.

‘Sorry Dad, it’s the speed ramps,’ I say.

‘Where there are speed ramps, road users should take extra care and expect the unexpected,’ says Dad. I put my hand on his shoulder and he smiles. I need to find his dentures when I park. I need to find Iris. My stomach muscles clench. My stomach is always the first thing to let me down. The doctor says this is where my stress lives. In my stomach.

‘Will you sing me a song, Dad?’

‘I used to squawk out a few numbers all right. Back in Harold’s Cross, remember?’

Harold’s Cross is where my father grew up. He lived in Baldoyle with my mother for nearly forty years and he never mentions it. But he can tell you the names of the flowers his mother grew in the long, narrow garden at the back of the house in Harold’s Cross.

‘Sing “Summer Wind”. I love that one.’ I love them all really. Dad starts to sing.

‘The summer wind, came blowin’ in from across the sea

It lingered there to touch your hair and walk with me …’

He remembers all the words, and even though his voice no longer has the power and flourish of before, if I close my eyes and forget everything I know and just listen, I can hear him. The ‘before’ version of him.

I don’t close my eyes of course. I am driving. In unfamiliar environs.

An Irish Ferries employee gestures me into a space. It’s a tight one. The car starts beeping, indicating that I am approaching some impediment; the side of the boat on one side and a Jeep on the other. Dad twists in his seat, anxious as a fledging perched on the edge of the nest. ‘Careful there,’ he says. ‘Careful.’ His face is pinched with fear and he puts both hands on the dashboard, bracing himself for an impact.

It’s hard to believe I was ever afraid of him.

I shiver. ‘Are you cold, love?’ my father asks. He puts his hand on my arm, rubs it, as if to warm me. It does. It warms me.

I smile at him. ‘Thanks Dad.’

I find his teeth buried in the pages of the Ireland roadmap I keep in the pocket of the passenger door. Brendan and I used to talk about going away for weekends when the girls were old enough to look after themselves. Just getting in the car on a Friday evening and driving away, wherever the road took us type of thing.

I don’t know why we never got around to it.

The wind is brisk when we get out of the car. Everything Dad needs is in the suitcase. Enough for a week, the manager said. But I have nothing other than the clothes I’m standing up in. The shoes – navy Rieker slip-ons – are comfortable and warm. And the navy trousers from Marks & Spencer are good travelling trousers. Hard-wearing and slow to crease. My navy and cream long-sleeved, round-necked top is a thin cotton material that does little to cut the draught. At least my cardigan is warm. I pull it across my chest, fold my arms to keep it there. My ponytail – too girlish for my age, my daughters tell me – whips around my head and I catch it in my hand, hold it down.

My other hand keeps a tight grip on the clasp of my handbag into which I have stuffed banknotes. The man at the ticket booth eyed me suspiciously when I pushed the bundle of cash through the gap at the bottom of the glass partition. I don’t carry money about my person as a rule. But I extracted the money from an account I’ve never used before. My mother opened it for me a long time ago but I only discovered it after she died, three years ago. I found the bank card in the blue woolly hat in the top drawer of her dressing table. I found all sorts in that hat. Her children’s allowance book. The prize bonds she got from her mother for her twenty-first birthday. My first tooth. A lock of Hugh’s white-blond baby hair. Her marriage certificate.

Stuck to the bank card on a scrap of paper was the PIN number – my birthday – and a note.

A running-away-from-home account, she had written. Just in case you ever need to.

I was shocked. At my mother, who, I was certain, did not approve of running away. Bearing up was her philosophy. Making the most of things.

I didn’t tell Brendan. He might have taken it the wrong way.

Iris doesn’t know we’re on the boat.

I haven’t worked out what I’m going to say yet. I don’t know what Iris will say either. There will be expletives. I know that much.

‘Where was I?’ says Dad, as if we are in the middle of a conversation from which he has become temporarily distracted.

‘We’re going to find Iris,’ I tell him, linking his arm. I sound definite, like someone who knows what they’re doing. I lead him towards the door. He shuffles now, rather than walks, as if he is wearing slippers that are too big for him. Progress is slow. Inside, there are flights of stairs, and progress becomes slower.

‘Hold onto the bannisters, Dad.’

‘Yes, but … where are we going?’

‘We’re going on an adventure,’ I tell him. ‘Remember when you used to bring me and Hugh on adventures? To Saint Anne’s Park? We’d be Tarzan and Jane, and you’d be the baddie, chasing us up the hills. Remember that?’

‘Oh yes,’ he says, and he does the laugh he does when he can’t remember but pretends he can.

Although maybe Hugh doesn’t remember either. He’s been in Australia nearly ten years now. Mam didn’t cry at the airport. She wouldn’t have wanted to upset him. He invited her to visit lots of times, but she said it wouldn’t have been practical, with Dad the way he was.

She should have gone.

I should have persuaded her to go.

Dad and I reach the bottom of the stairs. Set in the door at the bottom is a circular window, and through the glass I see a seating area with a hatch where you can get tea.

And I see Iris. Reading. I can’t make out the title of the book, but it doesn’t matter because I know what book it is. The Secret Garden. Iris’s version of a comfort blanket.

Her father bought it for her when she was a child. After her mother left. Iris remembers him reading it to her at bedtime. He’d never read to her before. That’s how she worked out her mother wasn’t coming back.

I open the door and a wave of heat and babble hits me and I feel my father flinch.

‘I don’t …’ he begins.

‘I’ll get you some tea,’ I tell him. He has forgotten that his favourite drink is a pint of Guinness with a measure of Bushmills on the side.

‘And a bun,’ I say. He nods and I persuade him through the door.

Iris has a window seat. One hand holds the book while the other is wrapped around a Styrofoam cup of tea. Her head leans against the window. Through it, grey waves rise and fall, dragging their white manes behind them. And the land, falling away with the distance we have already come.

I usher Dad towards her table. He clutches my arm as a small boy barrels towards us and I steer him out of harm’s way as the child, and – in hot pursuit – his mother, rush past us. The boy makes a loud and accurate siren wail and the noise alerts Iris’s attention. She looks over the top of the book and sees us. Surprise freezes her face. Her eyes are wide with it; her mouth open in a perfect circle. She looks unlike herself.

I have finally managed to surprise Iris Armstrong.

The seat beside her is empty. I coax Dad out of his coat, steer him into the chair.

‘Hello,’ he says to Iris. ‘I’m Eugene Keogh. I’m a taxi driver. From Harold’s Cross.’ He offers his hand, and Iris puts her book down and obliges, as she always does, with hers. Instead of shaking her hand, Dad holds it between both of his as though he is warming it.

The woman in the seat opposite Iris looks at me. ‘Do you want to sit here?’ she says. ‘So you can talk to your friend.’ Her smile is wide.

‘Oh … thank you but, I don’t want to distur—’ I begin.

The woman stands up, hitches the strap of her handbag on her shoulder. ‘It’s no problem,’ she says, smiling. ‘There’re lots of seats.’

When she leaves, Iris and I look at each other. I don’t know what to say, so I wait to see if Iris knows.

‘I can’t believe you got on the boat,’ Iris says.

‘You didn’t leave me with any choice.’ I can’t believe how calm my voice is. Iris stares at me as if she knows me from somewhere. Then, she shakes her head and points to the recently vacated seat opposite her. ‘You may as well sit down,’ she says.

Silence circles the space between us, predatory as a lion. Dad is the one to break it. ‘Where are we going?’

Iris glares at me, raises her eyebrows in a question, waits for me to answer it.

‘We’re going wherever Iris is going,’ I say.

‘No, you’re not,’ she stage-whispers at me, stretching across the table so I can see the golden-brown specks that circle the green of her irises.

‘Yes, we are,’ I say, injecting as much authority as I can muster into the words.

‘You can’t,’ Iris says.

‘I can,’ I tell her.

This could have gone on and on – Iris has alarming stamina – but then Dad interrupts. ‘Where is Iris going?’ he says.

The question produces a silence that’s as potent as the loudest sound. We stare at each other. If I manage not to blink first, I will be able to persuade Iris home. That’s what I find myself thinking. My eyes water. Iris blinks and turns to Dad. She puts her hand on his. ‘I’m going … away,’ she says.

‘Away,’ Dad says, nodding, as if it’s a location he’s familiar with and approves of.

Iris looks at me. She seems like a different person when her face is shadowed with worry. ‘I’m sorry, Terry, I never wanted you to find out like this.’

‘You thought it would be better if I found out afterwards? In a letter?’ Anger is not an emotion I’m familiar with. It burns.

‘I know this is hard to understand,’ she says.

‘Yes it is.’ I’m not going to make this easy for her.

‘Am I going away too?’ Dad says.

‘No,’ says Iris at the same time as I say, ‘Yes.’ Iris hands him the sports section of her paper. He runs his finger along a headline, mouthing the words, like the girls used to do when they were learning to read. She looks at me again. ‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘You don’t have to say anything,’ I tell her. ‘Just come home with me.’

Iris sighs. ‘This is not a decision I’ve taken lightly, Terry. It’s something I’ve thought about for a long time. I’ve done a huge amount of research, waded through so much red tape you wouldn’t believe it.’

I’m about to say that I would have helped her with the red tape. I’m good at red tape. The tedious part of plans, no matter how exciting the plans themselves are. Iris doesn’t have the patience for red tape.

But of course, I wouldn’t have helped her with the red tape for this plan.

The questions jostle for position in my brain. The first one out of the traps is Why. It comes out louder than I intended, almost a shout. ‘Why?’

Iris leans forward. ‘You know why.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t.’

‘Jesus Terry, do I have to spell it out?’

‘Yes.’

Iris looks surprised. In fairness, I am not usually so belligerent. ‘Two letters,’ she says, holding up two fingers. ‘M. S.’

I try to assume a reasonable tone. ‘Okay, so you have MS, which is not great, but it’s manageable. Isn’t it? You’ve always managed so well. And it’s not bad enough to …’

‘Which is why I’m doing it now,’ Iris says. ‘While I’m still in control.’ She makes everything sound so logical. So reasonable.

‘You hugged me when we had dinner last week,’ I say, remembering. Me, rummaging in my bag for keys as I walked to my car, and Iris coming after me and hugging me even though we’d already said goodbye at her door.

Iris shrugs. ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘You don’t usually.’

‘Well, I should.’ Iris leans back in her seat, looks out of the window. ‘You’re my closest friend,’ she says, her voice quieter now.

‘Which is exactly why I’m not going to let you do this,’ I tell her briskly, as if she hadn’t said something so … well, if she were her normal self, Iris would call that sappy.

‘Which is exactly why I didn’t tell you,’ Iris says. A surly-faced gentleman in an ill-fitting suit glances at us over the top of his Tom Clancy paperback. I send what I hope is a reassuring smile in his direction, which sends him scurrying back behind his book.

I take a breath.

In one of the many parenting books I have read, readers are advised to approach a discussion from a different angle, if the discussion is tying itself up in knots or backing itself into a corner.

I train a reassuring smile on Iris. ‘May I ask a logistical question?’ I say.

Iris rolls her eyes. ‘It was only a matter of time,’ she says.

‘Why are you going to Holyhead? What I mean is … you could have gone directly to Calais from Rosslare.’ This is the part of me that I can’t help. The part that drives the girls mad. And Brendan probably. Although I don’t organise him as much any more. He tends to do his own thing these days.

Iris shrugs. ‘I have things to do in London,’ she says.

I think about the other letter. Still sitting on the keyboard of Iris’s laptop. ‘Are you going to see your mother?’

Iris snorts. ‘Christ no.’

‘It’s just … the letter?’

‘It’s not a letter. It’s a copy of my will. So she knows she gets nothing.’ The bitterness in her tone is shocking. Also the mention of Iris’s will. That seems … definite.

‘I know, it’s childish,’ Iris says before I think of an appropriate response.

‘It’s not like you,’ I say. Then again, none of this is like Iris. It’s all foreign. Double Dutch, as Dad used to say.

Break it down into manageable pieces. That’s what I used to tell the girls when they got stressed about something. A school project, for instance.

I’ll start with London. ‘So,’ I say, ‘what’s taking you to London?’

Iris shakes her head. ‘I’d rather not say.’

‘Why not?’

‘For fuck’s sake, Terry, I just … okay then. If you must know. I’m going to see Jason Donovan. Happy? He’s playing at the Hippodrome in London tonight and I’m going. To see him. Okay? That’s my plan. That’s what I’m doing.’

Dad, who has abandoned the sports pages and has been following the conversation with his head like a tennis umpire, looks at me, waiting for my response, although I can think of none.

Iris smiles. ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Keogh?’

‘And a bun?’ he asks. I don’t know if he remembers that I promised him a bun. Or if it’s just an association he has with tea. Probably the latter. New information seems to glance off him, like hard rain against a window. Iris places the palms of her hands on the table, uses them to lift herself out of the chair. She refuses to wince, but her discomfort is visible all the same. When pressed, she has described the sensation in her limbs as stabbing, hot and thorough. She says she prefers the pain to the numbness. The numbness is what makes her walk as though she’s had a few too many glasses of ginger and brandy. The pain is what makes her refuse to wince.

‘I’ll go,’ I say, standing in one fluid movement. It feels unfair; my fluidity of movement, her concentrated effort. Although there is no point talking about fairness when it comes to MS.

Fairness has nothing to do with it.

It feels good to queue, even on a boat where the ground beneath your feet might not be as stable as you’d like. To do something as normal as queue. All around me, snatches of conversations.

‘… and then I said, well if you’re that nervous of strangers, you shouldn’t have gotten into the Airbnb business in the first place …’

‘… a reddish-brown. That would suit your colouring, and my stylist reckons …’

‘… and I was like, I’m so over that, and she was like …’

‘… the hire-car company said they’d only upgrade if …’

Ordinary, pedestrian conversations. As if everything is normal and life is trundling along on its usual rails.

I thank the man behind the counter and lift my tray. There is a smell of un-rinsed J-cloth that makes me twitch and think about grabbing every single cloth – the smell suggests more than one – throwing them in a bucket with Milton and water and leaving them there for at least an hour, even though the bleach could break down the fibres of the cloth, especially if they are a sub-standard brand.

I walk slowly with the tray, careful not to spill the tea, which has a not very hopeful grey pallor.

Iris is listening to Dad telling one of his stories, her face alive with interest, her head nodding along to all the details she has heard before, as if she has never heard them, as if this is the first time. She was always great with Dad. Great with all of them at the Society. Probably because of her experience with her own father. Although that was early-onset. A different animal altogether. ‘Probably the best one to get,’ Iris said. ‘I’d liken it to being struck by lightning. It takes you by storm, but it’s over nice and quick.’

It took eighteen months. Iris requested a leave of absence from the hospital where she worked at the time, and moved back into her father’s house. They watched re-runs of Neighbours every afternoon on UK Gold. Mr Armstrong jerked awake when he heard the theme music, pointing at the screen every time his favourite actor – Jason Donovan – appeared. Iris never worked out why, but thought it might have something to do with Jason’s teeth; perfectly white and even and on display every time he smiled his frequent and lengthy smiles. She bought Jason’s first album around that time. ‘It was like putting a soother in a baby’s mouth,’ she told me. ‘Especially for You’ was her dad’s favourite. Iris’s too, in the end.

I didn’t know her then. Back when she didn’t have MS. Or hadn’t been diagnosed yet, at any rate, although Iris says that she always got pins and needles in her legs as a kid. Sparkles. That’s how she described them to her dad at the time. Sparkles in her legs. So maybe it was there all along. In the wings, as Kate might put it. Waiting for its cue to take centre stage.

Her dad’s death. That might have been a cue. Anyway, that’s when she started experiencing symptoms. Turns she called them. Blurred vision, staggering, tripping, banging into the architraves of doors as if she’d suddenly lost touch with spatial awareness. And then the pain. Pain in her muscles, her joints, her limbs, her head. These turns didn’t happen all at the same time. They took turns and did not persist, so that, at first, Iris thought she was imagining them. Or she put it down to the tiredness she was feeling then. All the time. The doctor, vague, cited an auto-immune deficiency. Said it could be caused by stress which was natural, under the circumstances. With the recent death of her father and her new job – new career – as communications officer for the Alzheimer’s Society. He described these things as stressful. Iris disagreed. Her father dying was the least stressful bit of the whole process, she told me. ‘If he’d been a dog, he would have been put out of his misery long ago,’ she said. I agreed with her. I’ve seen the liberties this disease takes.

Iris told me that the first thing she felt when she was finally diagnosed was relief. That it wasn’t Alzheimer’s. She had experienced sporadic short-term memory issues and had thought the worst, which is so unlike her. That’s more my area of expertise. It turns out that memory problems can be another symptom of MS. Another little gift, as Iris puts it. Left at her door like a cat leaves a dead bird.

But there was nothing relieving about Iris’s diagnosis. Primary progressive Multiple Sclerosis.

‘I’ve been upgraded,’ Iris said when she came out of the hospital that day. The day she finally got the diagnosis. She didn’t want me to go with her that day. ‘It’s just routine,’ she said. I insisted. I had a bad feeling. And yes, I do have a habit of expecting the worst. But I had observed some deterioration in Iris’s movements at that time. A heavier lean on her walking stick. A slower gait. A tautening of the skin across her face that hinted at fatigue and unexpressed pain.

‘What do you mean? Upgraded?’ I said. Already, I could feel my heart inside my chest, quickening. I knew how Iris could dress up a thing. Make it sound acceptable.

And she did her best that day.

But it isn’t easy to dress up primary progressive MS.

‘We’ll get a second opinion,’ I said, as we walked down the corridor.

Iris stopped walking. ‘No,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I know it’s true.’ Her voice was quiet.

She was in a relationship at that time. Harry Harper. He was an artist and a year-round swimmer, which was where Iris met him. They met at sea.

Iris said theirs was a casual relationship and the only reason it had gone on so long was because of the sex, which she declared thorough. And she loved his name, being a fan of alliteration.

But she really liked him. I could tell. He was unselfconsciously handsome, interesting and interested. And he was thoughtful. Kind. He always matched Iris’s pace, was careful not to hold too many doors open for her, and remembered that she disliked dates, so he never put them into the sticky toffee pudding he made for her because he knew that she loved sticky toffee pudding but hated dates.

He had no children and one ex-wife with whom he played squash once a week.

And while Iris didn’t believe in The One – one-at-a-time is her philosophy – I could tell that she thought a lot of Harry.

And then she got the upgrade as she called it, and she ended her relationship with him shortly after that. She said she refused to be a burden to anybody.

‘You’re not a burden,’ Harry said.

‘I will be,’ Iris told him.

‘I don’t care,’ he said. ‘That doesn’t matter to me.’

‘It matters to me,’ Iris told him.

And that was that.

I always tell the girls, when they complain about this or that, that they must look at the situation objectively and try to find something positive in it.

The only positive thing about this version of the disease is that people don’t usually get it until they’re older, and so it was with Iris, who wasn’t diagnosed until she was forty-five.

Other than that … well, that’s it really. Everything else about the disease is … well, I suppose it isn’t always easy to see the positives.

Iris put a brave face on it, she didn’t battle it as such. She mostly ignored it. Never mentioned it. And that worked, I think. For a long time. People sort of forgot she had it, and that suited Iris down to the ground. And while there were always reminders, should you care to look for them, these were outnumbered by Iris herself. The mighty tour de force of her. The indefatigable fact of her.

I suppose that’s what’s so wrong about where we are now. Here, on a boat that smells like dirty J-cloths. It’s so unlike her. Oddly, it’s this thought that gives me pause. And some comfort. This is probably just a temporary setback. A down day. We all have those, don’t we? God knows, Iris, of all people, is entitled to one.

I walk back to my seat with my tray of grey teas and three KitKats – the only confectionary on offer with a protective wrapping – and also an ever-so-slight bounce in my step. Perhaps bounce is an overstatement, but there is definitely more flexibility in my gait than before.

An off day. That’s what this is. We’ll be calling it a ‘glitch’ in a few weeks’ time.

5
YOU MUST NOT PARK IN ANY WAY WHICH INTERFERES WITH THE NORMAL FLOW OF TRAFFIC.

The ferry takes three hours to get to Wales, and to be honest, I could not say much about the journey other than it passed.

I can say that Wales smells different. And it sounds different. Mostly fumes and the blaring of car horns as I release the handbrake and now we’re on the ramp again, but this time I’m driving down the ramp, onto foreign soil.

I have no idea what’s going to happen next.

Iris does.

She tells me that I am going to buy two ferry tickets back to Dublin for Dad and myself.

I nod and don’t say anything because I need to think.

THINK.

On the way into the car park, I have a panicky thought about what side of the road English people drive on. And Welsh people. It’s the same side as us, isn’t it? Of course it is. It’s just … I hate driving in unfamiliar places. Or in the dark. Or in bad weather. I have never driven in another country. The routes I drive are well-worn and familiar. The school run, back in the day. Over to Santry where the Alzheimer’s Society holds a few events during the week; singsongs and tea and buns and round-the-table conversations like what’s your favourite food and who’s your favourite singer and whatnot. Frank Sinatra always gets a mention, and not just from Dad. Semolina is a hit when puddings are discussed. I made it for the girls once. They wouldn’t believe me when I told them it was dessert. I ended up eating theirs as well as mine. They were right, it was lumpy.

Inside the car, nobody talks. I glance in the rear-view mirror. Dad is asleep, his head resting against the window. The collar of his shirt gapes around his narrow neck. Every day it seems there is less of him. Iris, in the passenger seat, looks out her window. There is nothing to see but lines and lines of cars parked beneath harsh fluorescent lighting. These places remind me of scenes in films where something frightening happens. Something shocking. Iris loves horrors. I like period dramas. When we go to the cinema, we compromise with comedies or biopics.

I reverse into a torturously narrow space in jerking stops and starts, which shakes Dad awake. He straightens and shouts, ‘Hard down on the left,’ and I stiffen, my neck snapping as I twist my head every which way until the car has been parked without incident.

I look at Iris. ‘We’re here,’ I say, unnecessarily.

‘How are you going to get out?’ she says, nodding towards the massive Land Rover inches away from my car door.

‘I’ll climb out your side.’ There is no question of me attempting to park in a more equitable manner. This is as good as it gets. Iris opens her door, hooks her hands behind her knees, and lifts her legs out of the car. Then she places her hands on the headrest and the door handle and uses them as levers to pull herself into a standing position. I hand her the crutches, and she leans on them, her knuckles white with effort. She has a wheelchair in her house. ‘In case of emergencies,’ she told me, when I spotted it, folded, behind the clothes horse in her utility room. I don’t think she’s ever sat in it. I stretch into the back seat and open Dad’s door. ‘What are we doing now?’ he wants to know, and his face is pinched with the kind of worry that the nursing staff talk about avoiding at all costs. He needs his routine, they tell me, when I arrive to take him out for one of our adventures as I call them. Feeding the ducks in Saint Anne’s Park. He still likes doing that. Even though he’s started to eat the bread himself.

Or to that nice café in Kinsealy where the staff are kind and don’t mind if Dad tears his napkin into a hundred tiny bits and scatters them around his plate. Or takes the sugar sachets out of the bowl and lines them along the edge of the table. Or spreads jam on his ham sandwich, or ketchup on his apple tart. They don’t mention any of that, and they remember his name and smile at him when they’re taking his order as if he is making perfect sense and not getting his words all jumbled up.

‘Don’t worry, Dad,’ I say. I smile and put my hand on his arm, rub gently. He looks frozen as well as worried.

‘Should I get out?’ He nods towards the door I have opened.

Iris bends towards him. ‘Yes, Mr Keogh, you can get out now,’ she tells him. ‘I’m going to take you for a cup of tea while Terry is organising your ferry tickets back to Dublin.’ She looks at me then, and I say nothing, and she nods as if I haven’t said nothing. As if I have agreed with her, because, let’s face it, that’s what most people do.

‘And a bun?’ Dad asks.

‘Of course,’ says Iris.

He negotiates himself out of the car. The sluggishness of the endeavour suits me, as I need time to think.

THINK.

I lift Iris’s bag out of the back seat. She’s travelling light. I’d say three days’ worth of clothes inside.

Which means I have maybe three days.

Three days.

During which Brendan will worry himself sick about the Canadians. There are young people in his department. Two of them with brand-new mortgages and one with a brand-new baby.

Last in, first out. Isn’t that what they say?

And Anna. Conscientious, hardworking Anna, who, despite all her conscientiousness and hard work, is always convinced that she will fail every exam she has ever sat. And these are her finals. Not a weekly spelling test. Although it is true to say that she worried about those too.

And then there’s Kate’s play, debuting in Galway next week. Which is a marvellous thing, of course it is. But she’ll be stressed about it and pretending she’s not stressed at all, which, in my experience, makes the thing you’re stressed about even more stressful.

I am needed at home.

What will happen if I’m not there?

I can’t imagine not being there. I’ve always been there.

But I’m already not there, and, so far, nothing has happened. Nothing bad at any rate. But it’s only been – I check my watch – seven hours since I left the house this morning. How can it only be seven hours? They don’t even know I’m gone yet. Brendan will assume I didn’t get on the boat, I know he will.

Because I am needed at home.

Apart from all that, am I really thinking about dragging my father behind me for three days? And apart from all that, Iris will go berserk if she even suspects that I am considering doing anything other than what she has told me to do.

THINK.

In the terminal building, Iris shows me where the ticket sales office is. ‘We’ll be in here, okay?’ she says, nodding towards a café that smells like the oil in the deep-fat fryer needs changing as a matter of urgency.

Iris smiles her full-on, no-holds-barred smile at me. ‘Thanks Terry,’ she says.

‘For what?’

‘Just … for being so understanding.’

I nod.

I understand nothing.

I stop outside the ticket sales office. Iris turns just before she and Dad enter the café and I make a great show of rummaging in my bag for something. My purse, perhaps. Yes, my purse. I find it easily. I make a great show of finding it. Kate will not be casting me in one of her plays any time soon. In my peripheral vision, Iris waits. My father looks around in his confused, vexed way as if he has no idea what he is doing here but he is certain it is nothing good.

I walk into the ticket sales office, my purse held aloft like a prize.

Once I am out of Iris’s line of vision, I take out my mobile. There’s a missed call from Brendan. I dial his number. The girls are always at me to programme people’s numbers into my phone, but I prefer doing it this way. It gives me time to gather my thoughts. Work out what I’m going to say.

Brendan answers the phone immediately, as if he’s been sitting beside it, waiting for it to ring.

‘Terry?’ he says. ‘Where are you?’

The small speech I had prepared deserts me. It wasn’t a speech exactly, just, you know, a collection of words. Sentences. An explanation. I had the words ‘unforeseen circumstances’ in there somewhere. I’m pretty sure I did. Now there’s nothing. Just a blank space in my head where the small speech had been.

‘I’m in Holyhead,’ I say.

‘Holyhead?’ As if he’s never heard of it.

‘Yes. The ferry port in Wales.’

‘What the hell are you doing there?’ His use of the word ‘hell’ jolts me. We don’t use words like that. And I can’t remember the last time he raised his voice. Not even at the telly when Dublin played in the final. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we argued, me and Brendan. It’s been ages. Years, I’d say.

‘Well, Iris is talking about going to a concert.’ This seems so … preposterous all of a sudden.

‘A concert?’ Brendan’s tone is halting, as though he’s positive he’s misheard.

‘Jason Donovan,’ I offer, just to get it out of the way. ‘He was in that soap opera, remember? Neighbours.’

‘What in the name of God does Jason Donovan have to do with anything?’

‘Well, nothing really. Only, Iris wants to go to his concert. It’s on in the Hippodrome tonight. That’s in London. You probably already know that.’

Down the line, I hear Brendan’s breath, being sucked into his lungs, held there, released in a long thin line through the small circle that he will have made of his mouth. The phone feels hot and slippery in my hands. When he speaks, his voice is conversational. ‘I thought Iris was anxious to do away with herself?’

I say nothing. I’m afraid to say anything because of how angry I suddenly am. I am boiling with rage. Seething. I feel like, if I breathed out through my nose, plumes of smoke would issue from my nostrils, that’s how angry I feel. It’s a strange sensation. It is huge. Bigger than me.

‘Terry? Are you there?’ Brendan says.

‘Yes,’ I say. The word sounds strangled, as if someone is pressing their hands around my neck.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘When are you coming home, for starters?’

‘I’m not sure.’

I hear Brendan shift the receiver from one hand to the other. ‘Listen Terry, you need to get back here. ASAP.’

‘Why? Has something happened? Are the girls okay?’

‘Of course they’re okay. Why the hell wouldn’t they be okay?’

There is that word again. And his voice still raised. Maybe his blood pressure too. The doctor said it wasn’t high exactly, just … that he needed to keep an eye on it. Watch what he eats and maybe do a bit more exercise. I glance around and a woman behind me snatches her head away, now apparently engrossed in the clock on the wall, which is, by my reckoning, five minutes slow. I lower my voice. ‘Brendan, listen, just calm down and …’

‘Don’t tell me to calm down. I’ve been researching this. You could face gaol time if you continue on this ridiculous odyssey. And dragging your poor father along as well. That is so … so …’ He struggles to find the appropriate word. ‘Irresponsible’. That’s the word he’s looking for. I feel the sting of it before he locates it and throws it at me like a punch. I see Iris and Dad in the café now, sitting by the window. Iris is pouring tea from a stainless-steel pot into two cups. Dad is cutting a Bakewell tart into a hundred pieces with a spoon while his eyes scan the people hurrying past the window. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t eaten even one of his five-a-day today.

Brendan is right. I am being irresponsible.

‘… and if the girls knew what you were—’

‘Have you spoken to them?’

Brendan sighs. ‘Anna rang me from the house earlier.’

‘Did she pick up the laundered clothes I left on her bed? I washed them with that new organic detergent I ordered. The pharmacist reckons it’s the best detergent on the market for people with eczema.’

‘For God’s sake, Terry, I don’t know. Just … come home. Stop this. Now.’

‘Did she?’

‘What?’

‘Get the clothes? I told her I’d have them ready for her. She’s been really anxious about the exams, and I—’

‘She wanted to know where you were.’

‘What did you say?’ I hold my breath.

‘I said … I just said you were out. With Iris.’

‘And she didn’t ask anything else?’

‘No. She’s too preoccupied.’

I am struck by what must be maternal guilt. The working mothers used to talk about it when I’d meet them sometimes at the school gate or the supermarket. I’d nod and say, ‘Oh yes’, and, ‘Isn’t it desperate’, and, ‘It comes with the territory’, but the truth was, I never felt it. I never left the girls. I was there. I was always there.

‘And Kate rang.’

‘Kate?’ Kate never rings. I ring her. Every Sunday night ten minutes before the news, which usually hasn’t started by the time I hang up. Yes, of course she’d ring me if I didn’t make the effort, but she’s so busy. Especially now, with the play so close. Anyway, she prefers texting to talking. I’m sure lots of young people do.

‘Why did she ring?’

‘I don’t know,’ says Brendan. ‘Something about our hotel accommodation in Galway. She said she couldn’t get through to you.’ He lapses into silence.

‘Is there a problem with the hotel?’ I ask.

‘I think so. I’m not sure. Look, you should really talk to Kate yourself,’ says Brendan.

‘But you were on the phone to her. Why didn’t you talk to her?’

‘I don’t do phones, Terry. You know that.’

‘Well then, I’d better not keep you.’

‘Terry, wait, I—’

I hang up.

That’s the second time in one day I’ve hung up on him.

The second time in twenty-six years.

6
IF YOU ARE APPROACHING A JUNCTION WITH A MAJOR ROAD, YOU MUST YIELD.

‘Are you okay?’ Iris wants to know when I arrive in the café where they have drained their tea and my father has eaten all of the tiny denominations of his tart.

I am out of breath and very possibly flushed of face, having run from the ticket office to the bookshop, then to the café. I don’t know why I ran. People stared as if they’d never seen a long, loping woman before.

I am out of shape. I can feel the flush of blood across my usually pale face. I had relied on running up and down the stairs several times a day, carrying baskets of laundry, to keep obesity and heart disease in check, and perhaps it did, back in the day. I can’t remember the last time I took the stairs at a run.

I put the book on the table, face up so there can be no confusion. Dad reads the title.

‘The A to Z of L … on … don,’ he reads in the faltering way he has now, dragging his finger under the words.

‘No,’ says Iris.

I take off my cardigan and sit down. I feel the sweat I have worked up collect in the hollows of my armpits, and I am reminded that I have no change of clothes for three days. For any days. I open the book. ‘Well, I’ve never driven in London before,’ I say. ‘Now, whereabouts is the Hippodrome?’ I ask, oh-so-matter-of-factly. I follow that with an offhand, ‘And have you booked somewhere to stay?’

‘You’re not coming with me, Terry,’ Iris says, in her quiet, steely voice that brooks no argument.

‘I am,’ I rally with a casual tone.

‘No,’ Iris says, her voice rising. ‘You’re not.’

‘If it were me going to Switzerland, would you come with me?’

‘If you wanted me to, I would.’

‘And if I didn’t want you to?’

‘Look, this is a moot argument. You wouldn’t go to Switzerland.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because … you’d always be thinking that a cure would be discovered.’

‘Exactly!’

‘That’s not going to happen.’

‘It could.’

‘It’s unlikely. In my lifetime at any rate.’

‘Only if you insist on cutting your lifetime short.’ I whisper this, but it’s a loud whisper and attracts the attention of a couple at a neighbouring table.

Iris glares at the couple, who whip their heads in the other direction so now it looks like they are taking a keen interest in the hot food, which no one in their right mind would do.

I was going to make seafood pie this evening. I tend to cook fish when Dad is staying. Good for your brain. Brendan doesn’t think eating fish will make any difference to Dad at his stage of the disease – stage five, we think – but it’s important to feel like you are doing something positive. I think about my bright, comfortable kitchen with the rocking chair that faces towards the garden where, only this morning, I admired the tulips I had planted as bulbs last September, dancing on their long stems, a palette of oranges and reds and yellows.

Dad points to a television screen mounted on the wall where a reporter is at the scene of a road-traffic accident. ‘If you are approaching a junction with a major road,’ he recites, ‘you must yield.’

‘You hear that Iris?’ I look at her. ‘You must yield.’

‘Are you all finished here?’ asks a waitress, appearing at our table with a tray in her hand and a wad of chewing gum bulging in her cheek.

‘Yes we are.’ Iris reaches for her sticks, hauls herself to her feet. She sways before she steadies herself, and I see the familiar curiosity in the waitress’s expression.

People like illnesses to be visible to the naked eye. Otherwise there’s suspicion. That’s one of the reasons Iris rarely tells anyone she has MS. To avoid a variation of, You look fine to me.

‘No, we’re not,’ I say to the waitress. ‘I’m sorry but … no, we’re not finished here.’ The waitress is brandishing one of those disinfectant sprays that I cannot abide, for who can tell what chemicals lurk inside?

‘I’ll come back in a bit,’ the waitress says, taking herself and her noxious spray away. Now she looks cautious, as if we are one of those groups where there’s no telling what might happen next.

‘I’m not letting you go by yourself, Iris,’ I say. I will say it as many times as I have to and then, if that doesn’t work, I’ll just follow her. Wherever she goes. I won’t let her out of my sight.

‘You can’t fix this, Terry,’ Iris says. ‘This is not one of those things you can fix, like buck teeth.’

It’s true that buck teeth are easy to fix, so long as you’ve got plenty of money. The girls’ orthodontist and Brendan’s bank balance can attest to that.

‘I don’t want to fix it, I just don’t want you to go by yourself.’ This is not true. I do want to fix it. It’s fixable. Not the MS of course. Not yet at any rate. But the situation.

Iris isn’t usually a pessimist.

She is a realist.

It is this side of her that I address now.

‘What happens if you fall? On the way to Zurich? What happens if you get sick? Or you’re so tired you can’t keep going. It’s a long journey. Anything could happen to you.’

Iris hoists her bag onto her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Terry,’ she says. She turns and walks towards the door. I jump up, the legs of my chair screeching against the floor. I have to do something. I have to say something.

THINK.

‘You could choke,’ I shout after her. ‘You could choke to death.’

This is cruel, and I wouldn’t say such a thing ordinarily. Or at all. Iris is not afraid of many things, apart from flying. And I know she’s not afraid of dying. Of death.

But the disease has compromised her swallow, and she is terrified of choking to death. She says she’d prefer to burn.

Where death is concerned, I am more of a worrier than an existential thinker. When the girls were little, I regularly imagined scenarios in which they were in mortal peril and there was nothing I could do to save them. Kate, in a Babygro, crawling out of an open, upstairs window. Anna toddling unnoticed off the footpath, as a Des Kelly Carpets truck, looking for number 55, bears down on her wobbly little body.

Iris stops and turns. She walks back to our table. ‘What did you say?’ It’s nearly a whisper, as if she can’t quite believe I’ve stooped this low.

‘I know the Heimlich manoeuvre,’ I say.

‘What has that got to do with—’

‘If you start choking,’ I say, ‘I can do the Heimlich manoeuvre.’

Iris shakes her head slowly. ‘Listen Terry, I know you don’t understand this and—’

‘I won’t try to change your mind,’ I say.

She looks at me then. Examines my face. I cross my fingers in deference to the lie, a habit that has persisted from childhood.

I sense a slackening of Iris’s resolve. While I know it’s more to do with her being tired than any powers of persuasion I may possess, I press home the advantage it affords me.

‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ I say, ‘if I let you go on your own.’

‘Oh for God’s sake, now I’m supposed to feel guilty on top of everything else?’

‘Well, no, but … I would.’

‘Fuck’s sake.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For making you feel bad.’

‘I don’t feel bad.’

‘You do.’

‘Who is feeling bad?’ Dad asks, anxious, and Iris and I look at him, and our expressions are both a little shame-faced, and I think it’s because we sort of forgot about him and because he has no idea what’s going on.

Iris sits down, all of a sudden, as if her legs have collapsed beneath her. She exhales and shakes her head, and I know I’ve won, although won might not be the appropriate word.

‘Two conditions,’ she says.

I can’t believe there are only two. I nod and wait.

Iris holds up the forefinger of her left hand. ‘One,’ she begins. ‘We do not talk about this again for the rest of the trip.’

I cross my fingers beneath a napkin and nod.

Iris leans towards me. ‘Do you agree?’ she says.

‘I do,’ I tell her, which cannot be categorised as a ‘white’ lie. It is an out-and-out blatant lie. I will think about this conundrum later. For now, I need to concentrate, because Iris is holding up a second finger. ‘Two,’ she says. ‘The furthest you can come is the Swiss border. After that, you have to turn around and go back home.’

‘Okay,’ I say. I am shocked at how easily the second lie comes. Already, I am a master of deception.

I can tell Iris is shocked too. In different circumstances, I would be delighted. Iris is a difficult woman to shock.

‘Definitely okay?’ she says.

‘Definitely okay,’ I repeat.

Once again, she reaches for her sticks, hauls herself to her feet.

Dad stands too.

So do I.

‘Please know now that I won’t change my mind,’ Iris says as we make our way to the door of the café.

I nod. I know that Iris believes that today. But there are other days up for grabs. Maybe three of them, judging by the weight of her bag. Enough time for Iris to change her mind. For me to persuade her to change her mind.

The truth is I’ve never been very persuasive.

But this is not about me, it’s about Iris.

Iris won’t do this. She won’t be able to, in the end. The simple fact of the matter is that Iris loves life. Maybe she’s forgotten that. Sometimes that happens, doesn’t it? To the best of us?

All I have to do is remind her of that one simple fact.

7
BEFORE YOU START YOUR JOURNEY, YOU SHOULD PLAN WHERE YOU WILL STOP TO REST.

My mobile phone beeps, indicating a text message, which is probably either from Brendan or one of the girls. I don’t tend to give my number to people. But I can’t look at the phone because I am driving.

I am driving on an unfamiliar road somewhere in England – we must be in England at this stage, we left Holyhead hours ago – and the cars that are not passing me are beeping at me even though I’m driving at – I glance at the speedometer – ohmydearlord – sixty-five miles an hour. I slow down. More beeping.

The motorway would have been quicker of course, but I do not thrive on motorways. I did it once. The M50. Even elderly drivers honked their horns, albeit apologetically, as if they had no alternative.

Iris yawns and stretches. ‘Where are we?’ she says. But I can’t answer her, because I don’t know. ‘Tell me again why you don’t have a GPS system in the car?’ she says, connecting her phone, which has run out of battery, to her charger.

‘Because I don’t need one,’ I say. ‘I usually know where I’m going.’

I hand Iris the road map. Except it turns out that Iris is not as good at map reading as I had assumed.

‘Why had you assumed that?’ Iris wants to know, and it is a fair question. In fact, now that I know the truth, my assumption seems preposterous. She picks my phone out of my handbag, tosses it back inside when she sees the ‘no service’ sign on the screen.

Dad, realising that things are not brilliant, has taken to reading aloud every road sign we pass, and there’re rather a lot of them, so there’s a lot of reading aloud, which would ordinarily be fine, but, in this instance where there is a sizeable chance that we have missed our turn – or turns – it is not fine.

I am sorry to say that it is annoying.

‘Dad, it’s okay, you don’t have to—’

‘Bangor,’ he calls out. ‘Is it that one, Terry?’

‘No, I don’t thi—’

‘Chester,’ he shouts later.

Iris abandons the map.

‘Birmingham,’ roars Dad.

It begins to rain. Traffic builds up as the afternoon dwindles. Iris slumps against her seat, as if she too has run out of battery. If pressed, she’ll say that fatigue is the worst thing about MS, even though she never seems tired. Apart from now. But I suppose today is … well, it’s not your common-or-garden kind of day.

I long to pull onto the hard shoulder and consult the map, but you can add hard shoulders to the list of things I’m terrified of. You’re putting yourself in harm’s way, stopping on a hard shoulder.

I drive on.

‘Milton Keynes,’ shouts Dad.

I glance at the petrol-tank gauge. It is less than a quarter full. And I can’t mention it, because if I do, Dad will worry, and when he gets hold of something to worry about, he keeps at it and at it, like the skin he picks off his ears and his lips even though you beg him not to, and you lather them with Vaseline when the medicated cream the doctor prescribes fails to work.

I keep on driving.

Iris’s plan was to travel by taxi on motorways through England and France.

In this first part of her plan, she has allowed herself to be thwarted. Which gives me cause to hope.

The rest of her plan contains a worrying paucity of logistical detail. Other than the deed itself. Which is scheduled for Saturday morning.

Five days. Not three.

She has packed light.

But there is a meeting with the doctor on Friday evening. To get the prescription. And to make sure Iris is of sound mind. Or, if my plan goes to plan, to cancel the deed because Iris will have changed her mind.

Iris never changes her mind.

But there is a first time for everything.

And a deed is not a deed until it is done.

Today is Monday.

I have time.

‘Luton,’ Dad calls out.

‘Watford.’

I am cautiously optimistic that we are going in the right general direction.

Ahead, a petrol station. Where I can fill the tank and consult my A–Z. Get my bearings. It’ll be alright.

The apartment Iris has booked is in Stoke Newington.

‘Is that near the Hippodrome?’ I ask, leafing through the guidebook.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Promise not to laugh?’

‘I’m pretty sure I won’t laugh.’

‘It’s got a secret garden.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it’s a roof terrace really,’ Iris admits, reddening. ‘But there’s a touch of The Secret Garden about it. You’ll see.’

Iris seems so certain that I’ll get us there. Today. On time.

Stoke Newington is an hour’s drive from Watford, according to the book. Which also tells me that it is 7.4 kilometres from the Hippodrome in Leicester Square where Jason Donovan is playing tonight. Or 4.6 miles, since it’s England and this is the measurement used here. I allow myself a small moment of optimism when some signal returns to my phone. I manage to find the apartment using an app on my phone, which I’ve never used before, since I’ve never driven anywhere I didn’t know the way to before. The woman’s automated voice sounds bored with an edge of impatience. Now, I’m worrying about roaming charges and the congestion tax, but Iris tells me roaming charges have been discontinued, while, with a couple of casual swipes on the screen of her freshly-charged phone, she pays the tax.

She makes everything seem so simple.

What is not simple is the London traffic, lines of it stretching through gridlocked junctions, along what seems like the same street, over and over again. But then I see the street signs, the names of which bring home to me how far away from home we are.

Turn left. Turn right. Turn right. Turn right again. Turn left. Take the second exit here. Straight through the junction there. It feels as though this is how I will spend the rest of my life, following the endless directions issued by an automated voice. It feels as if we will never arrive, so when we do, I am awash with equal measures of drenching shock and exquisite relief.

I look around. I am stopped outside an efficient-looking custom-built apartment block that does not suggest gardens, secret or otherwise. It does, however, have an underground car park to which Iris has the code.

The apartment itself, on the top floor of the block, appears spacious, and this impression is enhanced by the furniture, which is spare. And the echo of our footsteps bounces against the bare walls. There are narrow, steep steps up to the roof, which will be difficult to negotiate on crutches. However, Iris will negotiate them because she was right. There is a secret garden. Although garden might be a little suggestive. The area is small, and what there is of it has more in common with the secret garden at the beginning of that book than the one that flourishes beneath the horticultural attentions of Mary Lennox and her friends. The flowerpots and baskets are overstocked with the remains of last year’s annuals, and vigorous weeds line the gaps between the patio slabs. But while the minuscule water feature is fighting a losing battle with rust, the sound of the water falling over round, smooth stones is pleasant enough, and the deckchair beside it provides a bright splash of red against the vivid green of the ivy that has wrapped itself around the wrought-iron railings that enclose the space and ensure that nobody stumbles off the edge.

Instead of the shy little robin redbreast that shadowed Mary Lennox around the garden, there is a pair of ragged crows, perched on a satellite dish and inspecting me with cold black eyes. I step towards them and flail my arms. They don’t move.

At least the railings seem sturdy enough. The ground is a long way down.

Inside, the walls are painted a watery shade of cream and the grey floor tiles are cold underfoot. The kitchen, usually my favourite part of any house, is a line of gleaming appliances and spotless cupboards and marble countertops. The cooker looks as though it’s never been switched on.

Clinical. That’s the word for this kitchen. A wave of loneliness comes over me then, pure and potent. I nearly buckle under the weight of it.

I check my phone for the source of the earlier beep. A missed call from Brendan. I will of course phone him back. Just not now. I’ll do it later. Or tomorrow, when my head might be clearer. I need to clear my head. Get some fresh air. I need to get out of this kitchen. Out of this apartment that seems spacious but is not.

And, I remember, I need knickers. And socks. And a change of clothes. And pyjamas and a toothbrush. And a hairbrush.

Oh, and some sterling.

Which, for some reason, reminds me that I need a plug adaptor.

For France.

If we ever get to France.

Which we probably won’t. Because surely Iris will come to her senses before then?

I settle Dad in front of the telly, look for some sports or wildlife programme, or maybe a western. I happen upon Ronnie O’Sullivan playing snooker against Mark Selby in the Crucible. Dad immediately straightens in the armchair, folds his arms across his chest. ‘Quarter-ball on the green,’ he says, nodding towards the screen.

He manages to retain vocabulary for certain things. Snooker is one of those things. A testament perhaps to his collection of trophies and medals that once lined the shelves of my parents’ ‘good’ room, and now fill an enormous cardboard box in a dark corner of my attic.

Ronnie drapes himself along the edge of the table, the cue sliding through the V between his thumb and finger, towards the white ball. He pots the green. ‘That’s how it’s done, Ronnie, my boy,’ Dad tells him.

‘I’ll be back in a minute, Dad,’ I say, moving towards the door.

‘Sure thing, love,’ he says, without lifting his eyes from the screen.

Iris is in one of the twin beds in the smaller of the two bedrooms. In her Women’s Mini-Marathon T-shirt which she ran for the Alzheimer’s Society last year.

It was only twelve months ago that Iris ran ten kilometres and it didn’t cost her a thought.

Now she’s in bed in the middle of the afternoon.

‘What are you doing?’ I say.

‘I’m having a rest.’

‘You never have rests.’ I realise my tone could be described as accusatory. It’s like she’s standing on a soapbox, proclaiming the fact of her MS to anyone who will listen. It’s like she’s rubbing it in my face.

‘I often have rests,’ Iris says. ‘It’s just that I have them in my own house so you don’t see me.’

‘Well, you never say that you’re having rests in your own house.’

‘I know you’re angry with me,’ Iris says. ‘I get it.’

‘Why would I be angry with you?’

‘Because of this.’ Iris gestures around the bare room. ‘This … situation.’

‘Listen,’ I say. ‘I just came up to let you know that I’m going shopping. I wondered if you need anything?’

Iris shakes her head. ‘No. Thanks. Where are you going shopping? I didn’t see a Marks and Spencer around here.’ She grins. We both know how dependent I am on Marks & Spencer. But I can’t help it. It’s just such a … comfortable shopping experience. I know where everything is, and it’s not too expensive, and the quality is reliable, and yes, the clothes mightn’t make you stand out in a crowd, but that’s not what I’m aiming for, when I dress myself every morning.

‘You can leave your dad here,’ Iris says. ‘I’ll keep an ear out for him.’

‘Ah no, you won’t be able to get any sleep.’

‘I’m not sleeping. I’m just resting.’

‘Okay then, if you’re sure. I won’t be long. I’ll get some food.’

‘No, don’t. I’m taking you and Mr Keogh out for dinner tonight. I thought we’d go to a tapas restaurant.’

‘That sounds great.’ It’s not exactly a Sign. And I’m sure Iris doesn’t remember, but the first time I tasted tapas was with her.

Iris lifts her head, props it on her hand. ‘Do you remember those tapas we had? On Suffolk Street.’

I sit on the edge of her bed. ‘I do.’

‘You told me that night how Wilbur the pig turned you into a vegetarian on your eighth birthday, remember?’

‘I remember,’ I say, smiling.

Mam collected me from school that day, the two of us sitting on the top deck of the bus, playing I Spy, getting off in town, me gripping her hand as we walked across O’Connell Street towards Eason’s bookshop. I scanned the footpath for a policeman. Mam always said if I got lost, I should find a policeman, so I used to keep an eye out for them, just in case.

I read the whole book that day. Charlotte’s Web. Which was how I discovered that food like rashers and sausages and ham and pork all came from pigs like Wilbur. I locked myself in the bathroom and thought about all the rashers and sausages and ham and pork I had eaten. Mam just smiled when I told her that I wouldn’t be eating meat any more. Dad said, ‘You’ll eat what your mother puts in front of you and be bloody grateful for it.’

When Iris pressed me as to why I was a vegetarian in the tapas restaurant that night, I ended up telling her my Charlotte’s Web story.

‘That’s pretty impressive for an eight-year-old,’ she said. I remember the way she looked at me when she said that. An admiring sort of look, which I felt was unwarranted since I had no other tales to tell of heroic childhood deeds. I had mostly been a timid, careful child. But that night in the restaurant, when Iris looked at me like that, I felt perhaps there was more to it. More to me. It was … well, it was lovely.

Iris turns onto her side. Her eyes are closed. I move towards the bedroom door. ‘Terry?’ Iris’s voice is heavy with drowsiness.

‘Yes? I’m here.’

‘They were really good tapas, weren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Now get some rest.’

I walk out of the bedroom, through the hall towards the sitting room. I find I am humming the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus, which is odd as I am not a hummer, as a rule. I remember Iris singing it at the top of her voice on our way to the taxi rank when we left the tapas restaurant that night. And when I joined in – it wasn’t a conscious decision, it just happened – Iris threw her arm around my shoulder and sang even louder. And while it’s fair to say that I am not a natural singer and certainly not in public, nor am I comfortable with such familiarity, I raised my voice too and reached my arm around Iris’s waist.

That was before she needed her sticks. Her hands shook when she examined the menu, but she never referred to it or offered an explanation. Maybe she presumed I knew about her MS from that most dreaded of office shrubbery, the ‘grapevine’, which was the case.

I often forgot she had MS. I told her that once – I was apologising for it, actually – and she said it was the nicest thing anybody ever said to her. She was preparing to climb Carrauntoohil in County Kerry at the time. I was helping her pack, and she threw an enormous bag of pills into the top compartment of her rucksack, and that’s when I made the comment. Iris never had time for her MS. She was too busy getting on with the business of life and it’s funny, even knowing what I know now about primary progressive MS and what an awful diagnosis it is, I would still say that I have never known anybody as in love with life as Iris is. She makes living seem … I don’t know … sort of exotic. Something to be tasted with relish. Like tapas for the first time.

8
MAKE SURE YOUR VEHICLE IS ROADWORTHY.

Outside, it’s overcast and close. And I have to shop. For clothes. I hate shopping for clothes.

There’s no Marks & Spencer. There’s a Tesco Express. And a Starbucks. I buy a toothbrush and toiletries and a takeaway cup of decaffeinated coffee.

The clothes shops are boutiques with bald, angular mannequins in the windows and no price tags on anything. Then I spot a Sue Ryder charity shop across the road.

I’ve never bought anything in a charity shop, although I’ve contributed many black bin bags of the girls’ toys and books and clothes over the years. Not that I’m blowing my own trumpet or anything. It’s just, like I said, I hate waste, and Hugh said not to bother posting the girls’ clothes because his wife wasn’t big on hand-me-downs for Isabella, and besides, the price of the postage to Australia would negate the advantage, wouldn’t I agree?

Hugh’s wife – Cassandra – is a funny one. Not funny exactly, just a bit … aloof perhaps.

The last time Hugh and Cassandra came home, little Isabella was only two, so it must be, oh, five years ago now. They left Isabella with Brendan and me, while they stayed at the Merrion Hotel. They said they didn’t want to discommode us and they didn’t think the Merrion was really suitable for children. Besides, they knew I’d love to spend as much time as possible with my niece.

Which was true, but maybe not at four o’clock in the morning, which was the time she woke, what with the jet lag and the strange surroundings.

She ended up sleeping in my bed every night. Brendan slept in the spare room. He said he didn’t mind.

This must be a swanky part of London because the charity shop is like a proper boutique with an accessories section and an immaculately turned-out young woman with terrifying eyebrows behind the counter and a bright, fresh smell that has no bearing on old, discarded clothes and worn-out shoes.

The young woman eyes me, and I brace myself.

‘Can I help you?’

I always say, No. Thank you. I always say, I’m just browsing.

‘No thank you,’ I say. ‘I’m just browsing.’

‘What are you browsing for?’ asks the woman. Her name badge – handwritten in large, flamboyant print with a love heart instead of a dot over the i – says Jennifer.

‘I kind of need … everything,’ I say.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘You’ve come to the right place. I’d say you’re a …’ She looks me up and down, ‘ten?’

‘Yes, I—’

‘And I’m going to say, given your height, you’re a size seven shoe.’

I nod. She studies my breasts with great concentration.

‘34B?’

‘Yes. How did you …?’

Jennifer shrugs. ‘I’m just doing my job,’ she says with grave conscientiousness. ‘I’m going to step beyond my remit now and tell you a few things about yourself,’ she says, and I am suddenly terrified that she can see right inside me. That she knows everything.

Jennifer narrows her eyes at me. ‘You’re a reluctant shopper.’

‘Eh, well, I suppose you could say th—’

‘Yes or no is fine.’

‘Oh, em, right then, I … yes.’

‘You usually shop in Marks & Spencer.’

‘How did you kn— Sorry. Yes.’

‘You have no interest in style.’

‘Eh, well …’

‘Yes or no?’

‘I suppose not, no.’

‘You like comfortable clothes.’

‘Yes.’ That’s an easy one. Who doesn’t like comfortable clothes?

‘That you can hide inside.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t—’

‘Yes or no?’

‘Well … I don’t … Although I suppose I—’

‘Today’s your lucky day,’ Jennifer tells me, pointing to the fitting room. ‘Get in there and take your clothes off.’

‘All of them?’

But she has swept away and is already pulling various garments off hangers and – worryingly – talking to herself as she does.

My fear of being rude overrides all else and I do as I am bid. I leave my bra and knickers on. She didn’t mean me to remove them? Did she?

No. I’m sure she didn’t.

Besides, they don’t sell underwear in charity shops.

Or maybe they do now?

But no, they couldn’t. It’s all second-hand stuff isn’t it?

Even I draw the line at hand-me-down knickers.

‘Eh, I don’t need underwear,’ I call from behind the heavy velvet curtains that separate me from the sales assistant.

She does not respond, although I know she heard me because she paused in her conversation with herself.

‘Are you decent?’ she is good enough to ask, and I am about to tell her that I am standing here in my bra and knickers, only so that she is prepared for it, when she flings back the curtains and surveys me. While the bra and knickers are Marks & Spencer, they are fairly old. Even Marks & Spencer’s underwear gives out eventually.

Mine haven’t given out exactly. They’re just … a bit tired looking.

‘Let’s start with this skirt and top,’ Jennifer says, looking at me in the mirror. I look too and see what she sees. My tired old knickers and bra, my sagging breasts and stretch-marked belly and pasty skin and hairy legs. I see it all. The full glare of me – long and skinny with mousy hair and washed-out blue eyes – in the full-length mirror cruelly lit by bright, Hollywood-style bulbs.

All the better to see you, my dear.

I wrestle myself into the skirt (dry-clean only) and a run-in-the-wash top even though I’ll never buy them because they’re not my colour – a raucous green and purple – and they’re not my style – the skirt’s too short and the top is too, I don’t know, too green and purple.

Still, at least I’m covered up now.

‘Well?’ asks the young woman.

Something sharp on the waistband of the too-short skirt digs into my skin, and the V of the top’s neckline turns out to be a very long V so that I would spend all my time looking down, checking that I am still decent.

I feel a panic-buy coming on.

‘I’ll take them,’ I say. I need to get out of here. I know it could be worse. I could be in one of those awful boutiques where the women comment on my height and say, ‘I know just the thing,’ even though you’ve already told them that you’re only browsing and the just the thing turns out to be a scarf for eighty euros that you won’t ever wear because you don’t ever wear scarves.

Jennifer folds her arms and examines my face. ‘Why would you take them?’ she asks.

‘Eh … I … because they’re lovely?’

‘No they’re not.’

‘Then why did you give them to me to try on?’

‘It was a test.’

‘Oh.’

‘Which you failed.’

Jennifer smiles, and I notice a speck of bright-red lipstick on one of her front teeth which makes me feel a tiny bit better.

‘Okay,’ she says, unfolding her arms and rubbing her hands together. ‘We are going to practise, okay?’

I nod. I’ve no idea what she means.

I suddenly wonder if this is one of those television programmes where they make fools of people like me. But she’s looking right at me so I can’t scan the shop for hidden cameras.

‘I’m going to show you an outfit, and you’re going to tell me exactly what you think of it. And I’ll know if you’re lying.’ She glares at me like I’ve already told a lie, so I say, ‘Okay,’ and she smiles then and there’s the speck of lipstick again, and so we begin.

If it were a quiz, it would be the quick-fire round.

She holds up outfit after outfit. She’s calling them ensembles. They’re not just tops and skirts or tops and trousers. She adds jewellery. Belts. Hats. Shoes. Jackets. Arranges me so that I’m facing the full-length mirror and holds the first ensemble against me.

‘Well, it’s … it’s really lovely but—’

‘I just need one word,’ explains Jennifer, with end-of-tether patience. ‘An adjective preferably. Okay?’

‘Okay. But … before you begin, could I just quickly ask … do you have anything navy?’

‘Navy?’ she says. ‘What for?’

‘Well, because, you know, I like navy, and—’

‘Nobody likes navy,’ she says. She holds the ensemble – none of which is navy – up again.

‘Garish,’ I manage.

‘Oh. Right. Well done. This one?’

‘Tacky.’

‘Is that not the same as garish?’

‘No. Tacky refers mainly to poor taste and quality whereas garish could be good quality but lurid.’

‘Impressive. This one?’

‘Itchy.’

‘This one?’

‘Skimpy.’

‘This one?’

‘Fussy.’

‘This one?’

‘Scanty.’

‘This one?’

‘Dressy.’

Jennifer runs out of clothes before I run out of adjectives. She lets her now-empty arms hang by her sides, appraises me anew. I can tell she is surprised, and I feel ridiculously pleased about this. Emboldened, I point at a summer dress that I will never wear because it is a linen dress. A linen dress, the colour of early morning mist, that will both crease and stain easily. A linen halter-neck dress that will stop just short of my bony knees, and then there’s the rest of my legs, south of my bony knees, which I’d have to shave, and …

‘Good choice,’ says Jennifer, nodding with naked approval. ‘What else?’

In the end, Jennifer manages to persuade me to buy three carrier bags full, containing:

 bright-pink bomber jacket (silk – will have to be hand-washed in cold water);

 puffball red skirt (cotton – machine washable);

 green leopard-print A-line skirt (acrylic – the washing instructions tag is no longer attached, but I imagine it should be washed inside out, at a safe thirty degrees);

 brown (dark-chocolate brown, say 70% cacao) kitten heels, which I will never wear because I never wear heels (suede);

 silver-grey ‘boyfriend’ cardigan with long fitted sleeves (80% acrylic, 20% wool, will hand-wash for safety);

 a bright-pink tulle high-waisted midi-skirt (as yet unidentified synthetic mix);

 a lime-green T-shirt with bright-pink limes all over it (the softest cotton!);

 a pale peach cropped jumper with three-quarter-length sleeves (mohair!);

 brown ‘gladiator’ summer sandals (leather);

 two spaghetti-string tops (1. Scarlet! 2. Orange!!);

 one pair of white ‘skinny’ jeans (denim) with – subtle-ish – diamanté detail on back pockets (short, cold-water cycle, add a thimble of vinegar);

 a silk shirt-dress, much too short and impractical given the delicacy of the fabric and its shade of palest blue, which Jennifer says is the exact shade of my eyes (strictly dry-clean only);

 a black one-shoulder, one-sleeve top, which seems sort of lacking to me, but which Jennifer assures me is made for me, citing my jutty-outy collar bones and my freakishly-long arms. (I forgot to examine the washing instructions before purchase …);

 two bras (one a black, lacy affair, and the other so soft and white, it’s impossible to believe it’s ever been through even a delicate cycle);

 a straw hat with a pink gingham ribbon that Jennifer, with no trace of irony, says will make me stand out from the crowd.

Oh, and the linen summer dress, at the bottom of the bag, already creased.

Jennifer shakes her head.

‘I didn’t think you had it in you, Terry,’ she says because we’re on a first-name basis now.

‘Neither did I.’ Just because I now own the clothes doesn’t mean I have to wear them. There could be a Marks & Spencer in Dover, couldn’t there?

‘And you have to wear them. I’ll know if you don’t.’ Again that feeling that she can see right inside me. That she knows everything.

I try hard not to tell her anything. I tell her about the girls, obviously.

Brendan says I could go on Mastermind and have the girls as my specialist subject and I’d come away with the chair, quicker than you could say, I’ve started so I’ll finish.

I say I am on a driving holiday with my father and Iris. She doesn’t comment on the fact that I am on holiday without a change of clothes. Instead, she wants to know if Iris is my best friend.

I say, ‘Yes,’ even though the very fact of our friendship continues to remain a surprise to me. We’re like chocolate and chilli, me and Iris.

I do not say that Iris is my only friend. People tend to feel awkward around those who admit to such limitations. I have lots of acquaintances of course. But Iris … well, I don’t think Iris knows how to be an acquaintance.

*

Iris – quite literally – barged through the front door of my quiet, orderly life. Of course, I was aware of her before she did that, since she was the person who was in charge of the Alzheimer’s Society; the chairperson or the managing director or the CEO; I’m not entirely certain of her title, Iris is not one for such things. She joined as a volunteer after her father passed away. The Society had done a lot for Mr Armstrong – who was riddled with dementia, as Iris put it – and Iris said it was her turn to do something for them. So she joined, and within a short period of time, she had given up her job as Sister-in-charge at the Coombe Hospital, and was running the place.

The first time I spoke to her, she asked for my help.

No. That’s not true. She didn’t ask. She just happened to be in the kitchenette at the back of the hall where the Alzheimer’s coffee morning takes place twice a week, struggling with the lid of the coffee jar. She bore down on the jar as if the weight of her body might convince the lid to turn, but even though the weight of her body is significant – there isn’t an ounce of fat on her, mind; she just happens to be a strong woman – and even though her hands are enormous – she’d tell you that herself, hands like shovels, she’d say – she couldn’t get her hands to come to grips with the lid of the coffee jar that morning. Of course I didn’t let on that I’d noticed. I busied myself looking for jam. Dad had developed an insistent taste for blackberry jam smeared between two digestive biscuits. And still she struggled, so I reached out my hand and curled my fingers around the jar. I looked straight ahead, at the blackened grout ridging the tiles around the sink. I somehow already knew that Iris was averse to accepting help. I sensed her long fingers slipping away, so I slid the jar down to my end of the counter, and, with my two good hands, I turned the lid and passed it back to her, all the while concentrating on the grout. Perhaps I thought about vinegar and bread soda. How a combination of both might shift the grease. She might have mumbled a brief thanks, which I perhaps acknowledged with a nod. Then I located the jam, checked the best before date, and left the kitchen to the sound of the whistle of the kettle, high-pitched and insistent.

It was a few weeks later that I met Iris properly. I was at home. It was dinner time. We were eating mushroom risotto, so it must have been a Monday or a Wednesday, which were the days I cooked Kate’s favourite dinner. Anna’s days were Tuesdays and Thursdays. We got a takeaway every Friday, and I grilled tuna steaks on Saturday nights because Brendan loves them. Sunday was not set in stone, although I usually did a curry, which – luckily – pleased everybody.

It’s harder than you might think, pleasing everybody.

The doorbell rang and I answered it, and there was Iris Armstrong.

I was so surprised to see her, I didn’t even say hello. It was Iris who spoke first. ‘There she is. The hero of the hour.’

I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about.

‘Are you going to ask me in?’ she said, and it was only then I noticed the rain. Drizzle really, but unpleasant nonetheless when you’re standing at somebody’s door getting soaked by it.

‘Oh gosh, sorry, I … of course, come in.’

Iris walked around the kitchen table, shaking everybody’s hand. She never mentioned the fact that we were in the middle of dinner.

‘You’re a lucky man,’ she said to Brendan, clapping his shoulder. ‘Having a woman like Terry in your life.’ She smiled at him, and Brendan did the only thing anyone can do when Iris Armstrong smiles at them. He smiled back. I can see Brendan’s face even now, bright, as if it were lit by the power of Iris’s smile.

I stood at the kitchen door, at a loss as to what to do or say. I think I was worrying about feeding her. Was there enough food left over to warrant an invitation to eat with us? And whether Iris liked mushrooms. Lots of people don’t.

‘You must be so proud of her,’ said Iris, looking at the girls and Brendan in turn. When nobody responded immediately, she turned to me, then back to the table, put her free hand on her hip. ‘You didn’t tell them,’ she said. Her tone registered little surprise. Even back then, before we were friends, Iris seemed to know exactly who I was.

‘Tell us what?’ Brendan glanced from me to Iris and back to me, and his look was sort of fearful. Maybe fearful is too strong. But this wasn’t what usually happened in our house at dinnertime. A stranger in our kitchen. Making declarations. Not that Iris was a stranger exactly. I just … well, I hardly knew her.

‘Your mother saved Ted Gorman’s life today,’ Iris said.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t exactly say I—’

‘Ted is one of the Society’s biggest donors,’ Iris went on, wrestling herself out of her coat and draping it on the back of a chair before sitting down. ‘And today, when he was having a tour of one of our day-care facilities, he collapsed, and Terry here performed CPR on him and saved his life.’ She picked up a slice of garlic bread and took an enormous bite so that, for a moment, the only sound in the room was Iris’s molars grinding the crust. ‘I’ve just come from the hospital, and his doctor told me that if it hadn’t been for Terry’s swift action, Ted would be on a slab this evening.’

There was a stunned silence. The girls looked at me. Brendan looked at me. Iris looked at me. I felt the familiar heat of my blood rushing up the length of my neck and into my face.

‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.’ There was an edge of accusation in Brendan’s voice.

‘I was going to,’ I said. ‘After dinner, when we were relaxing.’ I’m not sure if that was true. I slipped away when the ambulance arrived, got on with the rest of my day. I picked up Brendan’s suit from the dry-cleaners, collected the text book I had ordered for Anna in Eason’s, brought Dad home from day-care, helped my mother wash her windows, did the grocery shopping on my way home, ran a Hoover over the hall, stairs and landing, then cooked dinner. Truth be told, I had mostly forgotten about Mr Gorman after all that.

‘This garlic bread is delicious,’ declared Iris, picking up Brendan’s napkin and wiping her mouth with it.

‘Please. Join us for dinner,’ I said, clenched with worry that there might not be enough.

‘I’d love to, I’m starving,’ said Iris, tucking Brendan’s napkin into the collar of her top. ‘I forgot to have lunch with all the excitement.’

‘I didn’t even know you could do CPR,’ said Brendan, as I managed to scrape a decent enough portion of risotto out of the pot.

‘I did that first-aid course, remember?’ I said. ‘When the girls were little. Just … you know … so I’d know what to do if they … burned themselves or something.’

‘Oh,’ said Brendan.

‘I nearly forgot,’ shouted Iris, pulling a bottle of champagne – I mean, proper champagne, not fizzy wine – out of her handbag. ‘We have to toast you, Terry. You’re a handy woman to have around in a crisis, big or small.’ Iris winked at me, and I thought she might have been referring to the coffee-jar incident. Not that it was a crisis, but … I was still pretty sure that’s what she meant all the same.

*

‘So,’ says Jennifer, when all my purchases have been bagged. ‘That’ll be seventy-four pounds and twenty pence, when you’re ready.’ I hand over two crisp fifty-pound notes, still warm from the ATM machine. I smile at her. ‘Goodbye Jennifer. Thanks for your help. And I hope everything works out. I’m sure your girlfriend will forgive you once you explain.’

‘You really think so?’

‘I do. Bonsai trees are notoriously difficult to maintain. Everyone knows that. And it’s obvious she’s crazy about you.’

‘Thanks T,’ she says. T! ‘Have a great trip. Where are you heading for next?’

‘I’m not exactly sure.’

‘Wow. I thought you’d be like my mum, with a laminated itinerary.’

‘I am, usually,’ I say. ‘My girls often give out about my lack of spontaneity.’

‘I always give out about my mum,’ Jennifer says, ‘but I’d be lost without her.’

Jennifer hugs me before I leave. Although perhaps she is overly-familiar with all her customers.

The door tinkles when I open it, and I step outside into the main street.

The High Street. That’s what you call it in England.

Either way, it’s still a street. An unfamiliar street in an unfamiliar place with no laminated itinerary in my handbag that I can touch with my hand from time to time, just to feel it there.

I think it’s then – that moment – that I come up with The Plan.

I’ll ring Iris’s mother.

Vera.

Called for Vera Lynn.

It’s like Jennifer says. We’d be lost without our mothers. Even mothers like Vera, who, on the face of things, is perhaps not going to be a poster-girl for motherhood anytime soon. But who is still, essentially, a mother. Perhaps she is who Iris needs right now.

In the absence of any other plan of action, this seems like a viable option.

I’ll be breezy. Let her know we’re in town. We’re passing through. Suggest that she might like to meet up. I could dress it up as a surprise for Iris.

Iris hates surprises.

But Vera is not to know that.

I’m pretty sure the last time Iris saw Vera was at her father’s funeral. Iris said Vera only showed up on the off chance there might be something in the will for her.

That can’t be true. Not entirely, at least.

Vera is Iris’s mother, after all. That will always be true no matter what has happened.

They haven’t spoken since then. But it’s never too late for a second chance. Did someone famous say that? Or did I just see it on a T-shirt once?

It doesn’t matter. The idea has taken hold, grown roots. I become convinced that a mother’s love is what is needed here. A mother’s love will be like a bridge over the hurt and neglect and, well … abandonment, yes, there’s no getting around that. It might prove a difficult one to bridge.

But not impossible.

9
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED.

I don’t have my mobile with me. It’s charging back in the apartment. But then, on the corner, I see a bright-red London telephone box.

Which could be a Sign.

I step inside the box. The phone is stained with rust and the smell of urine makes my eyes water, but there is a dial tone when I pick up the receiver with my sleeve-covered hand, and there is a number for directory enquiries, which I am going to have to call despite the astronomical cost of the service according to the instructions above the phone. I push many pound coins into the grimy slot before an operator says yes, she has a number for a Vera Armstrong on Archway Road – I remember the address from the envelope on Iris’s laptop – and would I like to be put through and I say yes I would and the operator says, One moment please, and now there is a ringing sound on the line, which means that somewhere in London, along Archway Road, a phone is ringing. I imagine an old-fashioned telephone – a black Bakelite perhaps – on a polished hall table with curved feet and a little drawer where she keeps, I don’t know, coupons maybe. Or knitting patterns.

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