‘Like, in a few months.’ Dell blew on her coffee so the steam rose up into her face. Peggy and Greta looked at her like it was unbelievable. That any of them could get a job and keep a job and maybe one day be allowed near the money. They hadn’t known Dell or Heidi when they were all drinking. They’d met in rehab. Peggy and Greta had heard what Dell and Heidi were like when they were drinking, and they couldn’t imagine there was a job that would stand by people who’d acted like that.

Peggy and Greta had wanted a job so badly. They’d never had a straight job. Their case manager had been trying to help them with a CV ever since they got out of rehab, but it hadn’t gone well. There were massive spaces. ‘What do you do about that?’ Greta asked. The case manager had shrugged. There was a job board in the dole office with lots of small cards pinned to it. Each card had the details of a job on it. If a jobseeker saw a job they liked the look of, they unpinned the card and took it to the counter. When Peggy and Greta had nothing to do and it was too soon to go to a meeting, they’d look at the job board. They weren’t jobseekers though, they were on a sickness benefit – there were no jobs for Peggy and Greta. They just liked looking at the cards, because they didn’t know that some of the jobs even existed. Most of what they knew about jobs was from Richard Scarry and things they saw on TV. They knew about working in a shop, and they knew about being a doctor or a lawyer, but they really didn’t know much about many other jobs. They’d never really thought of sleeping with men for cash or stealing as a job. That was the only experience they really had and there were never jobs like that on the job board.

One day, a couple of months ago, they’d been looking at the job cards and their case manager called them over. Their case manager had talked to her boss and her boss thought it might be a good idea for Greta and Peggy to do some volunteer work. They nodded.

‘The Salvation Army runs shops,’ the case manager said.

They nodded, because they knew the Salvation Army shops.

‘Could we volunteer in a Salvation Army shop?’ Greta said.

‘Probably not to start off with.’ Their case manager copied down an address on the back of a card that looked a bit like one of the job cards. ‘But you could sort the clothes.’

Greta and Peggy thought that would be fine.