When the light turned, Ron levered himself off the kerb and began his long trek across Bream. Gordon, tooted by the car behind, was tempted to leave his father to his adventure, but Ron might just make it to Norma’s place, where he would unleash havoc. The man’s iron will to escape was admirable, even awesome. If character is a composition of desire, Ronald Grimes was certainly a character. His desire was pretty much all there was left of him.

As Gordon kerb-crawled along Whiting, Ron gave him a distant glance and forged ahead. It wasn’t that Ron had dementia, though many of Norma’s friends, no doubt intending kindness, offered it as an amateur diagnosis. Ron wasn’t failing to recognise his son; he was refusing.

Gordon was reluctant to make a scene. But while he admired his father’s determination, he also had to stop him getting to Norma’s. It was a matter of safety. Ron’s kidney disease had reached the point where, as his specialist put it, his head was ‘literally full of piss’ and he was incapable of rational thought. Never a patient man, Ron now burnt on a permanent one-inch fuse. Norma was scared of his rages, and though Gordon had never seen any evidence of physical violence, you never knew what went on inside a marriage. Not your parents’. Not even your own.

Until this year, when Ron had still been living with Norma, as his uraemia advanced his strength had failed. He kept passing out and cracking his head on floors private and public. There was a series of hospitalisations. With his uncontrollable outbursts, his delusional insistence on driving his car, and his wild and woolly late-night forays into the medicine cabinet—to organise his pills into a Monday-to-Sunday dispenser would have been an intolerable concession to the nanny state—Norma could no longer handle him at home. Ron disagreed. But after his last fall, he was transferred from hospital to a residential nursing home, which marked the declaration of his one-man war of independence.

Gordon pulled over on Whiting and waited for Ron to wheel himself along.

‘Bit hot to be out, isn’t it?’

Ron paused, gave him a bland sneer, and kept going. Gordon got out of his car and fell into slow step alongside the squealing walker.

‘Maybe I can give you a lift? Where are you going?’

‘Don’t need you. I’m taking my exercise. Unless’—Ron eyed the Car With No Name—‘you’d like me to do the driving?’

‘Not in this lifetime.’