But these three he knew without thinking, without remembering. They were there same as Dad, too much alive in this place to ever not be here. Macca, jug ears and a stinking mutt of a dog always at his heels (though not in the car when it melded finally with the telegraph pole). Stokes, short but with a Hollywood smile that made every girl ready to kick off her undies and every bloke keen to smash his teeth into his throat. No one did, though, because he was always up to his not-real-high neck in both pussy and pills, and happy to pass on his extras to the other fellas. Forgot he had to take the children’s dose, they all joked at his funeral. Sam had been laughing the loudest. Held a deflating beach ball he’d found melting into the ground somewhere, said, Hey, look, I’m Stokes with an eccy.

Sam downed his entire prescription three weeks later. What the prescription was Will didn’t know. People just said it like that—took the lot, whole prescription—as though you were meant to know.

Prescription. Fuck. He stopped in the middle of the footpath, slapped his loose short pockets as if the packet could have somehow made its way in there without him knowing, unzipped the backpack and ferreted around with both hands even though he knew he had not opened the damn thing since the airport. When had he last held the pharmacy bag? Boarding the bus it had been in his right hand. He’d balanced it on top of the backpack while he fumbled his debit card out of his wallet with the whole hostile line bristling behind him. Balanced it there and then tapped his card and, still holding the card and his wallet in one hand and the backpack with the other, clomped down the aisle to an empty seat. He’d dropped the backpack while he put the card in the wallet and the wallet in his pocket, and then?

Someone would find it later today, he guessed, skidding out from under the seats as the bus took a corner. Check if there was anything good inside before chucking it in the bin or dropping it back on the floor, stomping it flat for the hell of it.

At the corner of Aunty Nic’s street it occurred to him that spending twenty-four hours travelling while grieving several relationships, panicking about the future and nursing a terrible toothache was pretty dumb. Doing all that in order to revisit the city where he watched his dad die and where his last known address was a state prison was completely fucking stupid.