I stand up. The world seems to spin and circles of light explode in my peripheral vision. All I can see is the edge. The perilous glint of it. Somewhere behind me, Dad and Winnie, chatting on the bench in the sun. In front, a drop of three hundred and fifty feet to the sea below. It might as well be a drop of three million feet. The result will be the same.

I keep my eyes trained on Iris, get behind her, keeping a wide berth from her flailing limbs. I kneel again and reach for her good ankle. Her leg flings out and her foot connects with my wrist bone. The pain is sudden and intense and sort of invigorating. I make another grab for her leg, manage to catch it, hold it between both of my hands and I’m on my feet now, pulling and hauling at her as if she’s a Santa sack of toys. I feel her foot—her entire leg—strain against my hands, like the thrashing of an animal in a trap.

Iris is a deadweight. I pull and heave. All I can hear is the frantic rasp of my breath and the roar of blood in my ears. But the edge of the cliff recedes and we are on the grass now and I keep pulling and heaving, widening the distance between Iris and the edge.

I lie on the grass beside her, wrap my arms around her and hold her tightly, as if I can squeeze the last of the contractions out of her body. “Iris? Are you okay?” The spasms have subsided to twitches now, up and down her legs, her arms. She makes short, sharp sounds, and I am reminded of a baby bird, chirruping from its nest, waiting for its mother to return with food.

“It’s okay, Iris, everything’s okay, just breathe, all right? Breathe.” I whisper the words into her hair, feeling my lips move against the soft thickness of it and thinking that she could do with a haircut and wondering if there’s a hairdresser on the ferry.

It’s weird, what you end up thinking about in a crisis.

Certainly not the things you might have supposed.

“Lezzers,” someone shouts, and I lift my head and see a group of boys. Teenagers. Maybe fifteen years old. Acne-soiled faces and all dressed in identical tracksuit bottoms, hoodies, and runners.

“Get lost,” I shout after them. I feel Iris begin to shake again and I tighten my arms around her, but it is not more spasms, as I had feared. She is laughing.

Her body is shaking with laughing. I look at her. The spasm is losing its grip on her face and her mouth releases her laughter. I sit up.

“What’s so funny?” I ask. I have to admit to being ever-so-slightly affronted by Iris’s mirth.

“Get lost,” Iris manages to say between laughs.

“Well, they were being rude,” I say.

“You didn’t have to be so brutal,” Iris says. She pushes herself into a sitting position. She looks pale and her breathing is fast, as if she’s run for a bus. Otherwise, she seems fine. I reach over and remove blades of grass from her hair.