‘Realistically, we’re not trying to fix it,’ Ada was saying. ‘We’re just trying to find a way for Nicole to live safely with her condition.’ ‘What if we found out what caused it? I read it can start with a trauma. If we knew what the trigger was, would that help?’

‘If that’s something your aunt wants to explore in therapy she can. I wouldn’t speculate. Sometimes there’s an obvious trigger, sometimes hoarding behaviour is situational, like in times of scarcity. And sometimes it creeps up over years and it’s impossible to say when a tendency to overbuy or under-discard becomes full-blown hoarding disorder. There’s diagnostic criteria for the condition once it’s active, but not to identify its potential cause or causes.’

At his local up in Mackay the old-timers would sometimes see fit to educate the younger drinkers about the way things used to be and the changes they’d seen. Some were obvious—technology and all that. But sometimes one of them would sniff and wrinkle his nose, say the rain doesn’t smell like it used to, and two or three others would nod solemnly, agree that there was something off about the smell this year. Sometimes the thing they’d talk about was the feel of the wind, drier and fiercer. Can’t measure it, but it’s different all right. The bugs and snakes, they talked about, too. The former down to city levels, the latter slinking up into everyone’s houses. No one was counting, understand. But you heard much more often these days about some poor bugger meeting one when he got up in the night for a piss or a kid finding one of them coiled up in their toy box, that was for sure.

The heat, now that you could measure, could see the changes on a weather map. The eggheads at BOM had even come up with new colours to accurately show it to those who demanded proof. The deep crimson and purple of imminent death, as Mercy said (cheerfully). The old men didn’t need any new colours, any time-lapse maps. They knew there was a time when you could walk on the road without shoes and not scald your soles. At least in bloody August!