What they couldn’t tell you, these old men, was when these changes happened. Not like the new Centrelink system which meant you got your pension straight into your bank account every Thursday instead of passed to you over a counter in a yellow envelope. There was a specific date that happened, even if you didn’t care to remember it. And not like the internet or satellite TV, which got more common as time went on, but whose introduction you could pinpoint to a particular week in a specific month in a verifiable year. No, the smell and wind and heat snuck up on them all. Which was the day it became definitely bad, no one could say, but bad it definitely was.

Was it like that for Aunty Nic? Day after day after day of one more towel or ornament or pillow or hand cream or book, until she couldn’t use the bath because it was full, found herself walking from the bedroom door to her bed without her feet touching the ground, and she genuinely didn’t know how it had happened? It wasn’t like she was having shipping containers emptied out into her hallway. Just ordinary items carried in one at a time. One thing cannot make such a difference, can it? A single towel or ornament or pillow or hand cream or book cannot instantly transform a house full of belongings into a hoard.

He’d missed the end of Ada’s spiel, but it was obviously finished because she was standing and placing a stack of brochures—the same ones Lena hadn’t bothered to read, he supposed—in his hands. She said she’d take him down to the area where he was supposed to wait for Aunty Nic, and as they wound through corridors and down some stairs and across a courtyard, then through a large echoey foyer, he was trying to think of a non-addict-sounding way to ask Ada whether a random GP could see when he’d last been to a different GP and that he’d asked for codeine. It was only when she squeezed his hand and said stay in touch with a questioning lilt that it twigged she might have thought he was working up the nerve to ask her out, that she wanted him to.