Was she taking the piss or were her standards that low? He hadn’t showered or looked in a mirror for three days, had been drinking and popping codeine like a man with no family, no job, no hope. Which he was. If this was her idea of ‘all right’ then he worried for her, he really did.

‘Got any coffee?’ he asked.

Her face closed down. She nodded towards the bar. ‘Usual place.’ One of the old-timers who lived out back was stationed next to the coffee urn. ‘Cobraball fire’s out of control, residents of Yepoon evacuated, six thousand hectares burnt in Livingstone Shire,’ he said, speaking to the mostly empty room rather than Will personally. He continued as Will carried his food and coffee over to a cleanish-looking table, reporting in the same flat tone on the status of a bunch of towns Will had never heard of. Only on the third mention of the out-of-control Cobraball fire did Will realise the bugger was reading the ticker-tape alerts from the silenced TV over the bar.

Eating his soggy beans and dry scrambled eggs Will scrolled through Mercy’s Facebook page, clicked a link she shared about some meteorologists in the Arctic who had been trapped with a bunch of polar bears on a tiny ice island as the rest of the ground literally melted away around them. In the comments someone said, Why is this news? Glaciers have been melting at unimaginable rates for years, and Will muttered that it was probably the meteorologists trapped with the bears bit that made it newsworthy, but there was no Mercy to hear him and he shuddered because the blokes inside who muttered to themselves were lost causes. The kind of men you’d hear had drowned in their own spew or thrown themselves off a balcony within a week of being released, of being unwatched.

The next comment said, ha ha no sympathy had it coming. The bears or the scientists? Us, maybe. We have it coming. It was what Mercy always said, that the human race was getting what it deserved. She said it with something close to excitement and it made Will queasy, this way of talking about climate catastrophe like it was justice. What about Haymish and Taylah? he’d asked her once. It was last summer, fifth day in a row over forty degrees. Do they deserve to live in a world where the temperature will stop them going outside for months at a time? She’d rolled her eyes at him. I’m taking about the human race being generally shit custodians of the planet. Don’t be so literal. When he asked if Haymish and Taylah weren’t part of the human race, she got properly shitty with him, told him he could cool it with worrying about her kids, thanks very much. Her KO move, reminding him they weren’t his to worry about.