Iris picks up her sticks, uses them to pull herself off the wall. “I think we should call it a night,” she says.

“No,” I shout, standing too. “I want you to say something. Something that makes sense.”

Iris looks at me, her face solemn. “I have told you everything. I’ve been as honest as I know how. There’s nothing more I can say. I know this is hard.”

“If our roles were reversed, you wouldn’t allow it. You just...you wouldn’t allow it.”

“You could be right. And I’d be wrong.”

I grip Joan of Arc’s arm to steady myself. To get my breath back. Iris waits for me to gather myself. I want to shake her.

“So that’s it then,” I say eventually. “You’re just not going to be alive in two days’ time? Is that the plan?”

Iris nods her head slowly. Deliberately.

“And I’m expected to...what? What am I expected to do?”

“I’m sorry, Terry.”

“Don’t say sorry. I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to tell me what I’m expected to do.”

“I don’t know.” She whispers it.

“I thought you had all the answers.”

“I don’t.”

“And you haven’t cried. Not once. You don’t care. You couldn’t give a damn. You just do whatever suits you. You’re just like your mother.”

I start to cry. I am not sad. I am too angry to be sad. I am fueled by a scalding, burning anger. I feel like I could run a hundred miles. Two hundred. With this anger. This fury. My tears sting my eyes and I blink them away. They are not sad tears. They are furious, blistering tears and I let them fall, let them storm down my face, hang along the line of my jaw then fall down the neck of my top.

“I’m not like my mother. Please don’t say that.” Iris takes a step forward, her hand reaching towards me. I slap it away. “You are. You’re running away, just like she did. And you hated her for it.”

Iris does not respond. For a moment, we survey each other, my chest heaving with the exertion of my breath. Then Iris turns, picks up her sticks, and walks towards the house.

“That’s it,” I shout after her. “Run away. As usual.” She keeps walking and does not respond.

The silence that follows is thick and heavy. I feel bowed by it. It feels like the weight of the world.

27

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

I am cold.

So is my anger. I can’t remember ever feeling this angry before. I am shaking. It feels like everything inside my body is thrumming with a vicious kind of energy. My heart and my lungs and my ribs and my blood. I feel electrified, like when Hugh dared me to put my hand on the fence that time in Wicklow. It was just me, Hugh, and Mam, that time. There had been a fight. But this time, Mam had shoved him back. When we got the bus home, Dad was in the kitchen instead of out in the taxi and there was a smell of burning and we ate the steaks that Dad had tried not to burn and we never usually had steak and I remember the tough texture of it in my mouth and how long it took for me to chew my way through it. It must have been before my eighth birthday. Before Mam bought me my very own copy of Charlotte’s Web.