“Everything okay?” Iris asks, looking up from her screen when I hang up the phone. I nod even though nothing is okay. Not really. And that’s not even including the terror I feel at the idea of driving the car off the ferry, into a foreign country in the dark on the wrong side of the road.

Iris puts down her screen. Leans towards me. Takes my hands in hers. “Your hands are freezing,” she says, rubbing them.

“They’re always freezing,” I say. “Cold hands, warm heart,” she says. “My heart must be on fire, so.”

Iris smiles.

“How about you?” I say. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

“What about earlier? That...attack you had. The muscle spasms.”

Iris shrugs. “That happens sometimes.”

“What else?”

She drops my hands, sits back in her seat. “Lots of stuff, Terry. It’s a very generous disease.”

“Have you told your consultant?”

Iris smiles, but it’s a humorless sort of smile. “Yes,” she says. “Every time I get a new symptom, I tell the consultant, who nods and says, yes, that’s the MS, prescribes me more medication which makes me tired or dopey or cranky or twitchy and waits for me to come back with another little offering and so on and so forth. That’s probably why it’s called progressive MS. It does exactly what it says on the tin.”

I ignore the bitterness in her tone.

“What about alternative remedies?” I say. “Acupuncture, reflexology. And you should consider therapy, you know. You’re probably a bit depressed, which is why...”

“Why what, Terry?” Iris says, bristling.

“Why we’re here,” I say, lowering my voice. “Why you’re thinking about...you know...going to Zurich.”

“You can’t even say it,” Iris says. “You’re insisting on coming, and you can’t even say it.”

I hate this. I hate confrontation. Especially with Iris. I never fight with Iris. I never fight with anyone. I take a breath and say, “I don’t think you’re doing the right thing.”

“Then why are you coming with me?”

“Because you need me.”

“I don’t, Terry. Not for this. I honestly do not.”

“Well, I need you,” I tell her. I know this is a cheap shot. Iris’s body sort of sags. She looks worn-out. When she speaks, her tone is slow. Deliberate. As if her voice is worn-out too. “Someday soon,” she says, “I won’t be able to walk. I’ll be in a wheelchair. I won’t be able to swallow. I’ll have to be tube fed. I won’t be able to shower. Or go to the toilet. I’ll have a hoist. I’ll have a colostomy bag. Attached to me. I will literally have a bag of shit dangling from the arm of my wheelchair. And it will smell bad and people will wince when they come and visit me and pretend that they don’t notice the bag of shit and that they’re not wincing at the smell of the shit. They will pretend that everything is lovely and nice and grand and normal and that my house, my life, doesn’t smell like shit.”