The counsellor kept talking. Peggy looked at their wristwatch, which Greta was wearing. Greta shifted her arm so Peggy could read the watch better. The talk was nearly over. Greta had made them both sandwiches for after the talk. They got hungry a lot. They’d left home at about quarter past nine. They could eat the sandwiches as they walked to the meeting that went from twelve till two every day. They went to the lunchtime meeting every day. The aftercare talk was a bit of a bonus. The days were long. You were only meant to go to part of the lunchtime meeting. It was designed so that people who had lunch from twelve till one and people who had lunch from one till two could go, but people like Peggy and Greta went for the whole two hours. It was great. It meant that after the meeting there were only five hours before they’d be picked up for the next meeting, which started at seven-thirty.

Meetings, they both agreed, were great because no one ever offered you alcohol at a meeting. There were never ads for alcohol at meetings. In meetings they felt safe. Everywhere else, not so much. Some people said things like, ‘I don’t have a drinking problem anymore. I have a thinking problem.’ Peggy and Greta didn’t laugh at that. They very much had a drinking problem. The week before last, they’d been walking into town to go to an appointment at the dole office when they saw a half-empty bottle of beer in the doorway of an empty shop. It stopped them in their tracks. They looked behind themselves and further in front of them. No one was there. No one would know. That was what they found the hardest. They had organised their lives so that it was very unlikely they would be anywhere they could buy alcohol, but what about this? Did it count if you drank half a beer off the side of the road? Was it just cleaning up? They told a woman after the lunchtime meeting and she told both of them that if they were tempted they still had an alcoholic mind. And they did. The woman said they needed to work harder – they weren’t working hard enough, sobriety was for people who wanted it. It upset them. They rang Diane when they got home and called the woman a ‘fucking bitch’ and said they wanted to punch her in the face and was it true? What she said? Was the temptation because they weren’t working hard enough? Was it impossible for them to stay sober?

‘There’s a name for an opinion like hers,’ Diane said.

‘What?’ they both said.