Nic makes her way to the only room she hasn’t seen since she returned from hospital. The door is difficult to push open, which is exactly exactly exactly right. The room is exactly right. She closes the door behind her and inches forward, nudging bags and baskets and books with her feet as she goes. She whispers apologies, hopes they’ll understand and forgive. She cannot bend to move them more gently, has to get to the bed before she drops. Once there, she lowers her bum, drags up one leg at a time. The bears and pandas and rag dolls squish together to accommodate her. There’s no way to get the blanket up now that she’s on top of it, but it doesn’t matter. The room is warm and her cuddly friends nuzzle her back, stop air creeping down the neck of her nightie.

What would’ve become of these snuggly fellows if the children had had another week or two to wreak their havoc? Charity bins if they were lucky. More likely the forever hell of the tip. And she would be living in a tomb without a soft, safe space to lay her head.

The irony is that Nic rarely came into this room before, but now that they’ve destroyed everything else it’s the only place she can breathe easy. The toys behind her, and piled-up clothes behind them. The lumpy sea between her body and the door patrolled by a fleet of misshapen boats. A stripy travel bag containing gifts and cards from boyfriends and workmates over the years; a shoebox of certificates from school that proved she was polite, was kind, was conscientious; laundry bags holding outfits she’d worn on days and nights that had been particularly sparkling; photos (in albums or in yellow envelopes waiting to be put in albums) of birthday parties and christenings; the treble recorder she played at the Opera House (in a group of one thousand school kids but only seventy of them with the treble recorders and Nic was in the front row with a bottle-green ribbon in her hair and when the audience applauded it was the proudest she’d ever felt up to that point).

A whole plastic laundry basket filled with all the letters and paintings and drawings and craft projects Lena made her in the years between birth and Brisbane. Snuggled in there the locket with a snippet from Lena’s first haircut, snatched from Michelle’s kitchen drawer, where it lay in a ziplock sandwich bag nestled with rubber bands, paperclips and lockless keys. Shamelessly snatched and right to do so, as Michelle had evidently never noticed it missing whereas Nic feels its protective presence every day and night.