Inside the car, nobody talks. I glance in the rearview 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 clotheshorse 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.