Too much, too much, she’s reached the end. She steps into the relative darkness of the staffroom—no fluoro lights in here, just a single regular bulb in the centre of the room. Her workmates are adjusting their collars and pinning on their badges, and she does the same. In a minute she’ll be up front opening her register, and a new kind of thrill will begin as she waits in place and the objects come past her, surprise surprise surprise. A whole day of that—now a pair of bamboo-fibre undies, now a cookbook and striped apron gift pack. Now here’s a box of glass tumblers with a blue tint and now look at this rattan and synthetic mix welcome mat. Now a crimson lipstick, now a skein of pale blue wool, now a pair of men’s slippers, tartan with non-slip soles. A Chupa Chup, a fan heater, a birthday card with a duck on the front, a corkscrew, a packet of paperclips, a battery-operated fire engine, a chequerboard-patterned phone cover, a framed print of a sailboat against a stormy sea, a child’s easel, a pair of safety scissors, opaque winter-weight tights, an amber lampshade, a box of home hair dye (burgundy), a shiny red backpack, a ceramic flower pot, a cheese grater, four pillows and four plain white pillowcases, an espresso machine, a tube of toothpaste. Each one passing through her hands, each one lending her a bit of its spirit, showing her, even if for only a millisecond, what might be possible.

She’s drifting in this lovely place when Lena texts to say: How messy was HER office, hey? Might have to report her to the authorities. Those combined with all that paper, disaster waiting to happen.

She blows a kiss at the phone, knows Lena is still her girl, will back her against these lunatics.

LENA

LENA

The front of the house was too neat. She’d seen enough Current Affair segments on hoarders to know that the courtyard should be cluttered with wheelless shopping trolleys and dead pot plants and washing tubs and bicycles without seats or tyres and maybe a couple of bird corpses and a rat skeleton. There should be mail piled up on the front porch, the edges chewed by snails and covered in slug juice. It should smell bad enough that even passing on the footpath you need to cover your face with a scarf and hold your breath.

But no. The pavers were even and recently swept, the hedge tidy. The front stairs were clear, as was the porch. You’d never, ever know that walking through the front door would be stepping into a nightmare realm. It was a trick front. A trap.

Like Josh.