By Wednesday they still hadn’t heard from Heidi. They were in the kitchen after a meeting and it was about nine o’clock, a couple of weeks since the big fight and the electricity money. Dell said Max had told her that Heidi had been at the rehab aftercare class. Greta and Peggy shook their heads. She hadn’t. Everyone else had been. Some people had brought notebooks and pens. The counsellor gave a talk about relapse prevention. It was boring. Michael, who wore better clothes than anyone else and owned a clothes shop and went on holidays to Asia a lot, looked bored. Then he noticed something in the leg of his trousers, a lump. He worked it down the leg of the trousers – it was a pair of underwear. Peggy and Greta watched the whole thing. Bored. The counsellor was talking for too long about drinking, so they started watching Michael. Michael was handsome and married. Peggy and Greta wondered about fucking Michael. Just to pass time. He seemed a lot cleaner than them. They looked down at their hands and they were sort of caked in dirt. They had no idea where it came from. They rubbed the skin and it sort of flaked off – the dirt or their skin, they weren’t sure which. They asked Dell once how often people normally showered. Dell shrugged her shoulders. ‘Once a week?’ she said. ‘That’s what we thought,’ Peggy said. Then Greta called out from the other room, ‘What about clothes? How often do you wash clothes?’ ‘Trousers?’ Peggy asked. ‘And sheets,’ Greta shouted. Even Dell didn’t know that, and she and Heidi worked in a clothes shop.

‘I reckon you can wear trousers quite a few times if you hang them up in between,’ Peggy said.

‘Like ten?’ Dell asked.

‘At least,’ Peggy said.

‘Sheets depends on whether you’ve had sex in them or not.’ Greta was being brave but really she had no idea. It had just occurred to her that it might be gross to sleep in a bed that had been fucked in.

‘What about clothes?’ Dell said.

Greta was in the room now, and she and Peggy looked at Dell, because that’s what they’d just been talking about.

‘Like if you have sex in them?’ Dell said.

‘Oh,’ said Peggy. Peggy and Greta had sex for money and sex with each other – which was really just masturbating so maybe didn’t count. Sometimes they had sex with each other to help themselves fall asleep, sometimes they did it because they were bored, sometimes they were sad and just needed a little bit of cheering up. Sex with anyone else couldn’t do those things and at the moment that was all they wanted.