I turn and run to catch up with Iris, surprised as I often am at the speed she can manage on her sticks, especially after last night. “Don’t get too close to the edge,” I shout after her. I tell her about the chalk and the crumbling nature of it and the continual erosion and how the cliff edge is constantly retreating from the sea and how the very ground we’re standing on could collapse at any moment. I know she’s listening because she’s nodding, and then she stops walking, about five meters away from the edge, and I think, this isn’t too bad, we’re safe enough here, and I am just about to wax lyrical about the views and the peace of the place and the wildflowers and all the things people say when they pause for breath in a place like this and that’s when Iris pitches her sticks on the ground and gets down on her hands and knees.

“Iris! Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m just going to poke my head over the edge.”

“No!”

“You don’t have to come with me,” she says. She’s already crawling towards the drop.

“It’s three hundred and fifty feet down,” I call after her.

“What’s that in meters?” she asks.

“It’s...eh...” It’s hard to calculate in these conditions. “...about a hundred and ten meters.”

Iris crawls on.

“Wait!” I say, realizing I have been duped with distraction. But wait for what? And it doesn’t matter anyway because Iris is not waiting. She is nearly at the edge now and if anything happens to her here it will be all my fault because I was the one who insisted on this ridiculous, stupid detour in the first place. And I’m supposed to be the one who’s hindering her, not helping her.

I lower myself gingerly onto all fours. The grass, toughened by salt and wind, feels harsh against my hands and pricks the skin of my feet through the gaps in my sandals. I find myself thinking about Jennifer with the terrifying eyebrows. If she could see me now, in my lime-green T-shirt with the bright pink limes that she called “ironic.” In my white skinny jeans with—subtle-ish—diamanté detail on the back pockets. She might mention how difficult it is to get grass stains out of white denim. And she’d be right.

I glance behind me where I see my father sitting on a bench holding hands with Winnie, chatting away. He is not looking at me.

I don’t know why I do it in the end. Perhaps there are things in your life that you just do and there’s no rhyme nor reason to them.

I start crawling. Towards the edge. Into my vision come Iris’s shoes, soles up. One of her pairs of sensible shoes, as she calls them.

Most of her shoes are sensible now.

If you ask her what the worst thing is about MS, she’ll say, shoes.

I see that she bought these ones in The Shoe Horn for €79.99.