I am out of breath and very possibly flushed of face, having run from the ticket office to the bookshop, then to the café. I don’t know why I ran. People stared as if they’d never seen a long, loping woman before.
I am out of shape. I can feel the flush of blood across my usually pale face. I had relied on running up and down the stairs several times a day, carrying baskets of laundry, to keep obesity and heart disease in check, and perhaps it did, back in the day. I can’t remember the last time I took the stairs at a run.
I put the book on the table, face up so there can be no confusion. Dad reads the title.
‘The A to Z of L … on … don,’ he reads in the faltering way he has now, dragging his finger under the words.
‘No,’ says Iris.
I take off my cardigan and sit down. I feel the sweat I have worked up collect in the hollows of my armpits, and I am reminded that I have no change of clothes for three days. For any days. I open the book. ‘Well, I’ve never driven in London before,’ I say. ‘Now, whereabouts is the Hippodrome?’ I ask, oh-so-matter-of-factly. I follow that with an offhand, ‘And have you booked somewhere to stay?’
‘You’re not coming with me, Terry,’ Iris says, in her quiet, steely voice that brooks no argument.
‘I am,’ I rally with a casual tone.
‘No,’ Iris says, her voice rising. ‘You’re not.’
‘If it were me going to Switzerland, would you come with me?’
‘If you wanted me to, I would.’
‘And if I didn’t want you to?’
‘Look, this is a moot argument. You wouldn’t go to Switzerland.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because … you’d always be thinking that a cure would be discovered.’
‘Exactly!’
‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘It could.’
‘It’s unlikely. In my lifetime at any rate.’
‘Only if you insist on cutting your lifetime short.’ I whisper this, but it’s a loud whisper and attracts the attention of a couple at a neighbouring table.
Iris glares at the couple, who whip their heads in the other direction so now it looks like they are taking a keen interest in the hot food, which no one in their right mind would do.
I was going to make seafood pie this evening. I tend to cook fish when Dad is staying. Good for your brain. Brendan doesn’t think eating fish will make any difference to Dad at his stage of the disease – stage five, we think – but it’s important to feel like you are doing something positive. I think about my bright, comfortable kitchen with the rocking chair that faces towards the garden where, only this morning, I admired the tulips I had planted as bulbs last September, dancing on their long stems, a palette of oranges and reds and yellows.
Dad points to a television screen mounted on the wall where a reporter is at the scene of a road-traffic accident. ‘If you are approaching a junction with a major road,’ he recites, ‘you must yield.’
‘You hear that Iris?’ I look at her. ‘You must yield.’
‘Are you all finished here?’ asks a waitress, appearing at our table with a tray in her hand and a wad of chewing gum bulging in her cheek.
‘Yes we are.’ Iris reaches for her sticks, hauls herself to her feet. She sways before she steadies herself, and I see the familiar curiosity in the waitress’s expression.
People like illnesses to be visible to the naked eye. Otherwise there’s suspicion. That’s one of the reasons Iris rarely tells anyone she has MS. To avoid a variation of, You look fine to me.
‘No, we’re not,’ I say to the waitress. ‘I’m sorry but … no, we’re not finished here.’ The waitress is brandishing one of those disinfectant sprays that I cannot abide, for who can tell what chemicals lurk inside?
‘I’ll come back in a bit,’ the waitress says, taking herself and her noxious spray away. Now she looks cautious, as if we are one of those groups where there’s no telling what might happen next.
‘I’m not letting you go by yourself, Iris,’ I say. I will say it as many times as I have to and then, if that doesn’t work, I’ll just follow her. Wherever she goes. I won’t let her out of my sight.
‘You can’t fix this, Terry,’ Iris says. ‘This is not one of those things you can fix, like buck teeth.’
It’s true that buck teeth are easy to fix, so long as you’ve got plenty of money. The girls’ orthodontist and Brendan’s bank balance can attest to that.
‘I don’t want to fix it, I just don’t want you to go by yourself.’ This is not true. I do want to fix it. It’s fixable. Not the MS of course. Not yet at any rate. But the situation.
Iris isn’t usually a pessimist.
She is a realist.
It is this side of her that I address now.
‘What happens if you fall? On the way to Zurich? What happens if you get sick? Or you’re so tired you can’t keep going. It’s a long journey. Anything could happen to you.’
Iris hoists her bag onto her shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, Terry,’ she says. She turns and walks towards the door. I jump up, the legs of my chair screeching against the floor. I have to do something. I have to say something.
THINK.
‘You could choke,’ I shout after her. ‘You could choke to death.’
This is cruel, and I wouldn’t say such a thing ordinarily. Or at all. Iris is not afraid of many things, apart from flying. And I know she’s not afraid of dying. Of death.
But the disease has compromised her swallow, and she is terrified of choking to death. She says she’d prefer to burn.
Where death is concerned, I am more of a worrier than an existential thinker. When the girls were little, I regularly imagined scenarios in which they were in mortal peril and there was nothing I could do to save them. Kate, in a Babygro, crawling out of an open, upstairs window. Anna toddling unnoticed off the footpath, as a Des Kelly Carpets truck, looking for number 55, bears down on her wobbly little body.
Iris stops and turns. She walks back to our table. ‘What did you say?’ It’s nearly a whisper, as if she can’t quite believe I’ve stooped this low.
‘I know the Heimlich manoeuvre,’ I say.
‘What has that got to do with—’
‘If you start choking,’ I say, ‘I can do the Heimlich manoeuvre.’
Iris shakes her head slowly. ‘Listen Terry, I know you don’t understand this and—’
‘I won’t try to change your mind,’ I say.
She looks at me then. Examines my face. I cross my fingers in deference to the lie, a habit that has persisted from childhood.
I sense a slackening of Iris’s resolve. While I know it’s more to do with her being tired than any powers of persuasion I may possess, I press home the advantage it affords me.
‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ I say, ‘if I let you go on your own.’
‘Oh for God’s sake, now I’m supposed to feel guilty on top of everything else?’
‘Well, no, but … I would.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
‘I’m