I was going to make seafood pie this evening. I tend to cook fish when Dad is staying. Good for your brain. Brendan doesn’t think eating fish will make any difference to Dad at his stage of the disease—stage five, we think—but it’s important to feel like you are doing something positive. I think about my bright, comfortable kitchen with the rocking chair that faces towards the garden where, only this morning, I admired the tulips I had planted as bulbs last September, dancing on their long stems, a palette of oranges and reds and yellows.

Dad points to a television screen mounted on the wall where a reporter is at the scene of a road-traffic accident. “If you are approaching a junction with a major road,” he recites, “you must yield.”

“You hear that, Iris?” I look at her. “You must yield.”

“Are you all finished here?” asks a waitress, appearing at our table with a tray in her hand and a wad of chewing gum bulging in her cheek.

“Yes we are.” Iris reaches for her sticks, hauls herself to her feet. She sways before she steadies herself, and I see the familiar curiosity in the waitress’s expression.

People like illnesses to be visible to the naked eye. Otherwise there’s suspicion. That’s one of the reasons Iris rarely tells anyone she has MS. To avoid a variation of, You look fine to me.

“No, we’re not,” I say to the waitress. “I’m sorry but...no, we’re not finished here.” The waitress is brandishing one of those disinfectant sprays that I cannot abide, for who can tell what chemicals lurk inside?

“I’ll come back in a bit,” the waitress says, taking herself and her noxious spray away. Now she looks cautious, as if we are one of those groups where there’s no telling what might happen next.

“I’m not letting you go by yourself, Iris,” I say. I will say it as many times as I have to and then, if that doesn’t work, I’ll just follow her. Wherever she goes. I won’t let her out of my sight.

“You can’t fix this, Terry,” Iris says. “This is not one of those things you can fix, like buck teeth.”

It’s true that buck teeth are easy to fix, so long as you’ve got plenty of money. The girls’ orthodontist and Brendan’s bank balance can attest to that.

“I don’t want to fix it, I just don’t want you to go by yourself.” This is not true. I do want to fix it. It’s fixable. Not the MS of course. Not yet at any rate. But the situation.

Iris isn’t usually a pessimist. She is a realist.

It is this side of her that I address now.

“What happens if you fall? On the way to Zurich? What happens if you get sick? Or you’re so tired you can’t keep going. It’s a long journey. Anything could happen to you.”

Iris hoists her bag onto her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Terry,” she says. She turns and walks towards the door. I jump up, the legs of my chair screeching against the floor. I have to do something. I have to say something.