Valia vowed she and Lucky would leave the Achillion that same day and she left the room before the orderlies brought in two new patients, both injured in the same car accident. After them arrived the traffic of nurses and doctors. Penelope, from her bed, watched a blue bee come in through one window and fly out another. Walter arrived and kissed her on the forehead, his glance rapid and hot, and he looked around and under the bed and in the cupboard for anything that belonged to her or might be useful to them. He found nothing. He suggested they move to Canberra, temporarily, and Penny instantly agreed—that was how the best decisions were arrived at, she thought; they should be made without hesitation. Walter heard there was work going in the capital city laying footpaths and roads, pouring foundations. Construction’s bread-and-butters. Walter knew two Austrian men, brothers, who lived down there. They had a spare room. Penny didn’t care where she lived. In the hospital she decided she didn’t live anywhere, yet. Home was a place in the future. Walter’s limbs shook as he picked her up from the bed.

‘The cast feels heavy,’ she said. ‘Am I heavy?’

‘The same as before,’ he said.

As Penny was put down in the car’s back seat, on a makeshift bed of pillows and blankets, and as she and Walter drove south, Penelope had the sick feeling she was being twisted against her will, beyond her control, and that other people could do something to you and this might change you forever, and because of these wounds and the defences you set up thereafter, you might become someone you never intended to be. Unless—unless what?

Without saying a word to Achilles, who sat out on the back verandah smoking cigarette after cigarette, Valia and Lucky packed two suitcases and left the Achillion. They found a train to Central Station and a tram that passed through Paddington. Once inside a hotel, Valia lay down on the bed looking up at the ceiling rosette. She’d stayed in this building before: the weekend they saw Benny Goodman perform, the night they bumped into him. Now they stayed in the cheapest room available. The rosette’s plaster was mouldy. Valia’s head turned and grazed the room’s dull sights: a patch in the wall still to be painted, a broom fallen from behind the door, a new cobweb. These disappointments seemed of a piece with Achilles’ crime. Lucky unpacked and the stark sound of banging cupboards and drawers was caught up in Valia’s sense of despair.

‘Achilles should be the one leaving the cafe, not us,’ she said. ‘Penny should not be leaving home. It’s all wrong. We must get her back.’

‘I figure this is the stage where you and I do our own thing.’