“It won’t smell.”

“Even my shit stinks, Terry.” She grins when she says that, and it takes some of the heat out of this awful exchange.

“I mean, your house won’t smell. I’ll make sure it doesn’t. You know how brilliant I am at cleaning. It’s like...my life’s work.”

Dad lifts his head off his arms, mutters something, then lowers it. Iris and I say nothing for a while. I try to still myself. My blood still feels like it’s racing around my body. I can hear it in my ears, loud as thunder. Iris picks up my hand, still cold. Squeezes it. I squeeze back.

“Listen,” I say quietly, doing my best even keel. “The thing is, you don’t know how long it’ll be before any of that stuff happens. Or if it will happen.”

Iris nods. “That’s exactly it,” she says. “I don’t know. I have no idea. I just know that it’s there. Somewhere in my future. Waiting for me.”

I can’t think of anything to say to that. I know how much Iris hates not knowing.

“This is why I got you to promise in Holyhead,” Iris goes on. “That we wouldn’t discuss it, remember? Because I didn’t want...this.” She waves her hand in the space between us.

I nod. “It’s hard,” I say.

Iris leans forward until her forehead touches mine. “I don’t want to fight with you,” she whispers.

“I don’t want to fight with you,” I whisper back.

“So let’s not fight, okay?”

I nod. My head feels heavy on my neck. I’m spent. We all are. I look out of the window, as the boat cuts a furrow through the Channel towards France, leaving home, and everything familiar, in its wake.

17

Even with the best headlights, you can see less at night than during the day.

The only sign that the Calais Jungle ever existed is a torn and sodden tent, slumped under a tree, with a sleeping bag hanging out of it, like a distended tongue.

And while the Jungle has been disbanded, the fencing has not. It’s everywhere; tall, sturdy poles tapering into sharp, twisted metal spikes.

I had to stop watching the news in the end. After the little Syrian boy was washed up on the shore in Turkey.

Alan Kurdi. Three years old. I remember his little red T-shirt. And the navy shorts that hung past his knees.

They looked brand-new, the T-shirt and the shorts. I imagined his mother, holding them against his small frame in the shop. Making sure they fitted. He might have wanted to put them on straightaway, like my girls always did. His mother saying no. Saying they were for the journey.

And the way he lay on the shore, facedown with his arms by his sides. The same way Anna and Kate lay in their cots for their morning naps. Except this little boy wasn’t sleeping in a cot. He was washed up on the shoreline of a Turkish beach, lying there like flotsam.