Will owned exactly the amount of stuff that fit into the backpack at his feet. He knew he was an extreme case, but still. He went through Mercy’s house, mentally opened all the cupboard doors, scanned the shelves. More pots and pans and plates and glasses than they ever used in the kitchen. Board games they never played in the hall cupboard, a drawer full of tangled cords and cables that had never been needed but seemed like they might one day. Mercy and the kids had more clothes than they wore, but no more than fit in the wardrobes. What else was there? What did people have? Books, maybe? Like, what do you call them—ornaments?

The old woman across from him muttered disgusting and he dropped his spit-covered hand in his lap. ‘Sorry,’ he said, because he was. ‘Toothache.’

‘Have you seen a dentist?’ She sounded like his mum. Exasperated at having to ask such an obvious question.

‘Yeah, nah. Bit broke, you know.’

The woman closed her eyes, sighed. He was in for a real lecture now. ‘You got a Medicare card?’ In a tone that suggested she expected him to say no, because that’s how evidently incompetent at adulthood he was.

‘Yeah. Dentists don’t take—’

‘Go to a doctor, love. Bulk billing. Not a dentist but better than shoving your filthy paws in there making it worse.’

He tried to smile, but it hurt quite a bit. ‘Yeah, good idea.’

She muttered something about common sense, went back to squinting disapprovingly around the carriage, looking for someone else to shame into taking basic, obvious action to sort out their shit.

At the Railway Square walk-in medical centre the receptionist said the wait might be an hour. He settled into an uncomfortably soft chair and scrolled through his social media feeds, then on to the news app, where he found himself looking into the face of a fifty-thousand-year-old wolf pup uncovered after massive permafrost melts in Canada. Another day in which the Sydney skyline is invisible, thanks to unprecedented levels of bushfire smoke blanketing the city, said the breakfast program playing on the TV over his head.

Twenty-four hours ago he’d been in a Mackay pub tasting locally produced catastrophic bushfire smoke with every spoonful of beans, and though he’d travelled almost two thousand kilometres by bus, two planes and a train, the background commentary as he held in his palm a recent photo of an animal last seen in the Ice Age was still of locally produced catastrophic bushfire smoke. Was this what vertigo felt like? Or was it simple dread, this sense of plummeting and spinning at the same time, with no surety you will ever land?