“You broke into my house?”

“No! I used the key you keep in the...” I lower my voice “...shed.”

The queue shuffles forward, and Iris prods her bag with her stick, follows it. She is nearly at the head now.

“Iris,” I call after her, “come on.”

“I’m sorry, Terry,” she says again, looking at me. “I’m taking this boat.” Her voice is filled with the kind of clarity nobody argues with. I’ve seen her in action. At various committee meetings at the Alzheimer’s Society. That’s another thing she hates. Committees. She prefers deciding on a course of action and making it happen. That’s usually how it pans out.

I stand there, my hands dangling uselessly from the ends of my rigid, straight arms.

“I am not going to allow you to do this,” I say then.

“Next,” the man at the ticket office calls.

Iris bends to pick up her overnight bag. I see the tremor running like an electrical current down the length of her arm. I know better than to help. Anyway, why would I help? I’m here to hinder, not to help.

I’m not really a hinderer, as such.

Iris says I’m a facilitator, but really, I just go along with things. Try not to attract attention.

Iris hooks her bag onto the handle of the crutch, strides towards the man at the hatch. Even with her sticks, she strides.

I stumble after her.

“I’m collecting a ticket,” she says. “Iris Armstrong. To Holyhead.”

The man pecks at his keyboard with short, fat fingers. “One way?” he asks.

Iris nods.

3

Don’t move from one traffic lane to another without good reason.

I run outside. My father is still in the car. The car is not on fire. I fling open the door. He looks at me with his now familiar face; the one that is somehow vacant, like an abandoned house. Or a space where a house used to stand.

“Dad, I...” My voice is high and tight with fear. Crying seems inevitable. My brother called me a crybaby when we were kids.

“Your mother should be back by now,” he says. “She’s been gone a long time.”

I clear my throat. “She’ll be back soon,” I say. I don’t have time for crying. I have to think.

THINK.

I could call the guards. Couldn’t I? I have Iris’s letter. That’s proof, isn’t it? But is it illegal? Iris’s plan? She’d never forgive me. But maybe she would, in the end. Maybe she’d be grateful I forced her hand?

I look at my watch. The boat leaves in an hour and a half.

THINK.

I ring home. I don’t know why. Nobody is there. But the ringtone, the sound of it ringing in my own home in Sutton, in the hallway that smells of the floor polish I used this morning, the phone ringing in its own familiar way, is a comfort to me.

In the early years, I did nothing but worry about the house. The lure that it represented to would-be burglars. The strain of the mortgage on Brendan’s salary. And on Brendan himself. I worried that he would end up like his father, who died a week before he retired from the building sites.