A shot of pain up her spine. New pain. Not an intensification of the pain that’s been with her since she woke in hospital, not the already familiar tugging that came as the painkillers wore off. Altogether new, like a piece of amber glass from the gutter had leapt up and stabbed itself into her back. Stabbed her hard in the tailbone and then dragged itself towards her heart, digging in deeper as it went. Nowhere to sit and rest a minute here. Can’t provide a seat or ledge or anything at all that would encourage people to linger. You might accidentally give someone a moment of comfort. You might allow an injured and broken person a place to rest before continuing on her way in the world. Can’t bloody have that, can we?

So this is what you get then, concerned citizens wanting to discourage comfort for the undesirables. You get a mess of a woman collapsed on the bristly, bindi-strewn so-called grass of the nature strip. A mess of a woman, yes, she is aware. Used to walk this street briskly, looking out for forgotten things on the ground, and now she is one, too bruised and crazy-looking for even her own self to want to pick up and care for. Noisy, too, the pain making her mewl against her own will. She hears herself: a cat who’s caught her paw on a jagged tin lid.

I am a woman who needs rescuing, she thinks. I am a public nuisance. I am a matter of public health and safety. I am a danger to myself and my neighbours. I am in need of intervention.

Steve is with her again, as he was last time she was laid out helpless. He is reminding her that she will be fine. He nodded off or fell down in the street all the time in his final years and it never killed him. What killed him was being alone inside. No one to stumble upon him and call for help. No one to bash down his door and carry him out, humiliated but alive. She could argue, tell him death is preferable to shame and violation and betrayal. But she only means it for herself. For him, she wishes all the humiliation and agony in the world if it had meant survival. She wishes he’d OD’d right here where she lies and that passers-by spat and cursed at him, but only after calling an ambulance. She wishes he’d had everything taken away from him, been forced to stay in a huge, echoey hospital, prodded and patronised by people who couldn’t even be bothered to introduce themselves before fingering your wounds. She wishes, even, for his hatred, if only she’d earned it by saving his life.