Mandy follows them down the corridor to the elevator. By the elevator is a group of old ladies in wheelchairs, their expressions running from vacant to peculiarly malignant. Rat tries not to look. She tries not to breathe in the canned institutional odor. From open doors, you hear the contrasting clamor of a half-dozen televisions.

“Don’t mind your gran,” Mandy says to Rat, while they are waiting for the elevator to arrive. “It’s nothing personal. She doesn’t have her head right, and it make her angry, sometimes.”

“How has she been this week?” Gillem asks.

“Oh, today is a good day. Yesterday, you couldn’t get a word out of her. Wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t move, just lying there, head flopped down on her chest like she was asleep, only her eyes are wide-open staring. I gave her a little sponge bath, I did her nails, usually she like that—this time, nothing.”

Gillem gives a sigh that’s more of a groan. “I don’t know what we’d do without you, Mandy.”

“I love your mum. Sometimes she can be a riot. You just have to get used to her little ways.”

Gillem and Rat are both silent on the elevator ride down to the lobby. Rat has never seen her father looking quite so grim. When they’re back out on the street, however, he gives Rat a pale smile. And suddenly, they are both laughing. It’s the semihysterical laughter of people who are shamefacedly relieved because they are alive and well, and have safely escaped prison or the hospital or the madhouse or the grave.

“Come on, young lady,” Gillem says, taking her by the arm. “Let’s … scoot!”

They break into a run. His legs are longer, but she’s more in practice. Passersby stare, because these are days when people are very jittery, when someone running suggests a new civil emergency, cause for collective panic. Gillem and Rat are still laughing when they reach the Euston Road.

“Whew,” he says, stopping to draw a deep breath. “What do you need, to get that out of your system? Me, afterwards, it’s either a long hard ramble or a double whisky. Both at the same time, and I end up in a ditch, very happy.”

“Ramble?” suggests Rat.

“Let’s start with the ramble, then we can move on to the whisky.”

He hails a black cab. “Hampstead Heath, please.”

“So that’s the story,” says Gillem. “This is where it’s ended. When she first started losing the threads of her mind—when I’d cleaned up my own life and was feeling immensely self-righteous—I thought it was some kind of judgment on her life of excess. It took me a long time to accept that what’s so terrifying about disease is its impartiality.