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obstructions. He gave the spigot on the head of the cylinder a quarter turn and put the oxygen mask to his ear to check it was delivering. Then he closed the oxygen tap and replaced the cylinder in the door pocket.
    He looked up again and adjusted the rearview mirror to watch Zoe and Kate approach the car. They paused while something was said, then they briefly hugged. He knew he wasn’t the most sensitive observer butthe signs were hard to miss this morning: these rushes the two women made to the brink of disintegration, followed by the check, and the careful backing down. They’d been like this all the way down here in the car. It was always an intricate friendship to navigate, this bittersweet affection of rivals, and yet it seemed more urgent today.
    Kate got in the back seat next to Sophie, took her cheeks in her hands, and went to kiss her on the forehead. Sophie squirmed and took evasive action, the way any healthy eight-year-old tomboy would. Jack smiled. You collected these signs of normality. You took them to the bank, knowing that if you saved up enough of them, then the compound interest would eventually grow your deposit into a child in remission.
    Zoe got into the passenger seat next to Jack.
    He glanced across at her. “Everything okay?”
    She tilted her head. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
    Jack said nothing.
    “What?” she said.
    “Let’s go, for God’s sake,” said Kate from the back.
    He shrugged, released the hand brake, and reversed five yards. Sophie announced that she needed a wee. Jack smiled. It was all the Ribena: the Stormtroopers had been very free with it. He eased the car five yards forward again, reapplied the hand brake, and sat looking straight ahead.
    Kate undid Sophie’s seat belt and helped her to go at the edge of the car park, tucked away behind a van. Jack and Zoe watched the pair of them.
    “You’re more dad than human now,” she said.
    He ignored the jibe. “You’re frazzled today.”
    Zoe snorted. “You know how to make a girl feel special.”
    “Overtraining?”
    “Overthinking, maybe.”
    “It was good of you to come. It means a lot to Kate.”
    He let himself look across at her.
    She said, “Sometimes it all gets a bit heavy, you know?”
    Jack gripped the wheel a little tighter. “Are you okay with it?”
    Zoe thumped her chest lightly above her heart. “It just gets me more than it used to. I mean, Sophie’s so ill…”
    “But you’re fine?”
    Zoe hesitated. “Fine…” she said, seeming to test the feel of the word in her mouth as if it hadn’t been used for some time, like housewife , or Rhodesia . “Fine,” she said. “Yeah. I mean… fuck, how could I not be?”
    Jack turned to look back through the windscreen, and they sat in silence as Kate pulled Sophie’s jeans back up and brought her back to the car.
    “What are you two talking about?” Kate said as she swung open the car door.
    “The Tour de France,” said Zoe.
    “Oh, I’ve heard of that,” said Kate.
    She reseated Sophie and reattached her seat belt. Jack watched in the mirror and knew what his wife was thinking: how skinny their child was becoming. In three months of relapse she’d lost half the weight she’d put on in three years of remission. He reached out a hand behind the headrest of his seat, and Kate took it, and they squeezed. The pressure created a fixed point in time, to which so many accelerating events could be anchored.
    With Sophie safely strapped in, Jack drove away.
    “Sophie?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Next time you kick the back of my seat, I’m taking you back to the Death Star to be brought up by the Sith.”
    “Sorry, Dad.”
    He slowed almost to nothing on the speed bumps of the film studio’s exit road, and he checked in the rearview mirror to make sure that Sophie wasn’t jolted too much. When he pulled out onto the main road,he drove defensively. He’d been on a course to learn how, since it was unlikely that any kind of road traffic accident would