“Okay,” I say. I am shocked at how easily the second lie comes. Already, I am a master of deception.

I can tell Iris is shocked too. In different circumstances, I would be delighted. Iris is a difficult woman to shock.

“Definitely okay?” she says.

“Definitely okay,” I repeat.

Once again, she reaches for her sticks, hauls herself to her feet.

Dad stands too. So do I.

“Please know now that I won’t change my mind,” Iris says as we make our way to the door of the café.

I nod. I know that Iris believes that today. But there are other days up for grabs. Maybe three of them, judging by the weight of her bag. Enough time for Iris to change her mind. For me to persuade her to change her mind.

The truth is I’ve never been very persuasive. But this is not about me, it’s about Iris.

Iris won’t do this. She won’t be able to, in the end. The simple fact of the matter is that Iris loves life. Maybe she’s forgotten that. Sometimes that happens, doesn’t it? To the best of us?

All I have to do is remind her of that one simple fact.

7

Before you start your journey, you should plan where you will stop to rest.

My mobile phone beeps, indicating a text message, which is probably either from Brendan or one of the girls. I don’t tend to give my number to people. But I can’t look at the phone because I am driving.

I am driving on an unfamiliar road somewhere in England—we must be in England at this stage, we left Holyhead hours ago—and the cars that are not passing me are beeping at me even though I’m driving at—I glance at the speedometer—oh-my-dear-lord—sixty-five miles an hour. I slow down. More beeping.

The motorway would have been quicker of course, but I do not thrive on motorways. I did it once. The M50. Even elderly drivers honked their horns, albeit apologetically, as if they had no alternative.

Iris yawns and stretches. “Where are we?” she says. But I can’t answer her, because I don’t know. “Tell me again why you don’t have a GPS system in the car?” she says, connecting her phone, which has run out of battery, to her charger.

“Because I don’t need one,” I say. “I usually know where I’m going.”

I hand Iris the road map. Except it turns out that Iris is not as good at map reading as I had assumed.

“Why had you assumed that?” Iris wants to know, and it is a fair question. In fact, now that I know the truth, my assumption seems preposterous. She picks my phone out of my handbag, tosses it back inside when she sees the “no service” sign on the screen.

Dad, realizing that things are not brilliant, has taken to reading aloud every road sign we pass, and there’re rather a lot of them, so there’s a lot of reading aloud, which would ordinarily be fine, but, in this instance where there is a sizeable chance that we have missed our turn—or turns—it is not fine.