Gordon picked his father up and recommenced towards the Car With No Name.

While trying to keep her eyes on the road, Kelly turned towards her father-in-law, who was burrowing through the glove compartment. Gordon was in the back seat, staring out the window.

‘Don’t waste your time,’ she said. ‘Only an idiot would keep a second key inside the car.’

‘That’s why I’m looking.’

They were almost at the nursing home and Ron was going through Gordon’s things with the persistence of a truffle pig. Kelly, who had lied about being under the alcohol limit, proceeded slowly, as if to drive below the limit of visibility.

Ron smacked the glovebox shut.

There ought to be some kind of criminal offence, Kelly thought, for being Ron Grimes.

‘What are you smiling at?’ Ron said.

‘How Gordon took you to The Lodge, where you had a lovely time, not that he needed to, only because he felt sorry for you, and yet already you’re plotting to steal his car.’

‘What else would you expect me to do?’ Ron said.

‘Can we do a drive-by delivery at the nursing home?’ Kelly looked in the rear-view mirror at Gordon, who was still disengaged. ‘I can slow down below twenty, and we just chuck him out?’ ‘You’ve really made a mess of your lives, haven’t you?’ Ron said. ‘Do you have a point,’ Kelly asked, ‘or are you just taking pleasure in the bleeding obvious?’

Ron was reading a caravan park brochure from Up North that Ben had left in the glovebox. Ben, Kelly knew, had an overdeveloped curiosity in real estate to go with his premature anxiety about his parents’ finances. He had picked up the brochure as an encouragement to Gordon.

‘Onsite vans,’ Ron read. ‘All those losers who couldn’t keep up with the city, flattering themselves that they’re “refugees”. As if they’d escaped from a war instead of their own uselessness.’

‘If it pleases you, I won’t call myself a refugee,’ Gordon said.

‘So you are thinking about it!’ Ron exclaimed. ‘I told your mother you would let us down.’

‘He’s already putting everything on hold for you and Norma,’ Kelly said.

‘And what would “everything” be? Curing cancer? Stopping global warming? You’d be saving the world right now, except for your responsibilities to your dear mother and father?’

‘No,’ Gordon said, ‘just putting off moving Up North to live in a caravan like all the other losers.’