‘Bullshit,’ said Diane, and laughed. She got them to read a story in a book about someone who didn’t get over the urge to drink for two years. ‘Just ’cause it’s not easy doesn’t mean you can’t stay sober,’ Diane said. ‘Don’t drink, and go to meetings and keep doing the work you’re doing. And keep talking to me.’ She said goodnight and told them to go to sleep.

‘Heidi wasn’t at the aftercare talk,’ Greta told Dell while they were trying to do the dishes.

‘Oh,’ said Dell. None of them could get the oven dish clean. They tried the brush, then a Steelo pad, then Greta got some Jif from the laundry and they were trying that.

‘Will that poison us?’ Peggy asked.

Dell and Greta didn’t think so. ‘People clean the oven with it,’ Greta said. ‘Surely if it was going to kill us it would have killed everyone by now. The fumes.’

Peggy shrugged. And they tried again.

Before the meeting, they’d made cheese on toast for dinner. Someone had brought them round some cheese – it was a housewarming present, they said, but they’d been in the house for a while now. They looked at the cheese for a long time after the person left. They all knew cheese on toast was a thing. Dell and Heidi had had it when they were kids. Heidi wasn’t there to ask, though, and Dell knew what it looked like but not how it was made. Peggy and Greta couldn’t remember ever having cheese on toast on account of them being fat kids and being on a diet since they were five. They backward engineered it from what Dell could remember and it was pretty good. The first slice was the worst. They tried it one slice at a time – so as not to waste too much. They experimented with toasting the bread first. Then they added some Vegemite from a food parcel Social Welfare had given Peggy and Greta on the half-drunk street beer day. They saw the Vegemite as a reward from god for not drinking the beer. ‘Which was probably actually piss,’ Peggy said.

‘Which was probably actually just a beer bottle half-full of piss,’ Greta agreed.

They’d all left straight after the cheese-on-toast dinner. Greta and Peggy thought maybe they’d left the oven on. They hadn’t been able to concentrate on the meeting. Not really. They just kept thinking about what would happen to their bond if they burned the flat down. They were pretty sure they’d go to jail. Then someone said something that caught their attention and they were in the house taking off their coats before they remembered how scared and sure they’d been that they would be arriving home to a pile of ash.

Dell was putting all her effort into scraping off a piece of baked-on cheese.