And at the end of this bewildering journey there was Aunty Nic, the only member of her family who wasn’t neurotic and brittle and insane. There she was begging the cops to pass her tiara. The woman Lena had accused of fastidiousness because she carried wet wipes at all times, would whip one out to clean the cafe’s spotless cutlery before eating her lunch, another to wipe her hands afterwards—that woman was sprawled out, seemingly unbothered by the crust of snot above her lips or the piss stain on her pants. She was extremely agitated, though, that the cop had knocked over a Cinderella-themed lamp with his knee.

While the lamp-knocking cop tried to get Nic to tell him how long it had been since she’d fallen, the other one, a woman around Nic’s age, took Lena out to the hallway and suggested they clear a route for the ambos to get through.

‘They’ll be here in under ten, so no time to be precious,’ she said, moving quickly up and down the hallway, switching on the lights of the adjoining rooms. She began lifting stacks of newspaper and tossing them into the kitchen. Lena stumbled her way to the front of the hall and began on the stacks there, lifting as many papers as her arms could hold and throwing them into the living room, where they floated to rest on a Salvos warehouse full of soft furnishings.

The ambulance arrived just as Lena and the cop were pushing the last stacks out of the way. They let her ride along and she wanted to reach out and stroke Nic’s face, but her hands were streaked black, her nails gunked up with sticky dust. She’d tucked them under her bum and willed herself not to cry.

By the time Nic had been examined and admitted, and Lena had taken care of the paperwork as best she could and waited another forty minutes for someone to give her access to the family area, she was so exhausted she could barely blink. Yet sleep wouldn’t come. If her brain paused its looping of the nightmare tunnel of Nic’s hallway it was only to splice in the smiley-face emoji and six fingers from the video. And accompanying the pictures a commentary track, running the whole time:

nastiest bitch in the series yet

tits are good but the rest is

Noise it makes when it cums

fuck dude cover that wound no one wants to see that shit

A+ serious good bouncing there

Love these whores so cock drunk they don’t know whats happening

look at em titties go