There used to be a door from this room to the backyard and laundry. She guessed there still was, somewhere in that corner between the end of the sink and the entrance to the living room. Behind the stacked cardboard boxes, which were themselves almost concealed by a pedestal fan, a breadmaker, a blender, two irons and an assortment of other small appliances and their tangled, grimy cords.

She ran the tap a minute, splashed her face with water, drank greedily from her hands, then refilled the water bottle. She opened the fridge, hoping there’d be something cold in there she could chug before she continued.

There was not. Nothing to chug, nothing cold.

On the top shelf—raised as high as the notches on the side would allow—were a dozen or more small dark amber bottles, some with fading prescription labels, some with Chemists’ Own labels advertising their contents. Among them were stacked boxes of Panadol, Nurofen and Codral, as well as at least twenty other packets of medications Lena hadn’t heard of, wound-up bandages, boxes of bandaids and, poking up between the rungs of the shelf, tubes of what looked like medicated cream. Fat, full tubes; scrunched-up-at-one-end tubes; squeezed-completely-flat tubes.

The shelf below held enough single-serve packets of mustard, ketchup, salt, pepper, soy sauce, wasabi, chilli sauce, sugar and Splenda to service a medium-sized restaurant for a month. Each condiment had its own section, though the slipperiness of the packages and the sheer bulk of the lot of it meant that there was considerable overlap, ketchup sachets having fallen onto Splenda stacks, sugar onto salt, soy sauce onto chilli. Still, enough care had been taken that the space was divided into mostly uninterrupted chunks of colour: red, yellow, brown, green and white.

Between the middle shelf and the vegetable drawers were tissues. On the left, four regular-sized boxes stacked two by two, on the right at least forty purse-sized packets.

The left-hand vegetable drawer was filled to the brim with boxes of toothpicks, matches, travel-sized sewing kits and other small packets and boxes Lena couldn’t bear to examine. The right-hand drawer held an astonishing range of condoms, with tubes of lubricant and several different brands of pregnancy test mixed in.

The freezer was stacked with ice cube trays. All of them empty, many of them broken.

‘I’m being pranked,’ Lena muttered, groping behind the fridge until she found the plug, which was firmly pushed into the socket. She flicked the switch and waited to hear the whir of the cooling unit start up. Nothing.