Heidi was talking. She’d been talking for a while. On and on about something. It was important, but Margaret was looking out the window. There’d been rats under the deck and in the walls of the house. Margaret had put poison out and now she hadn’t seen a rat for a few weeks, not since she’d seen a really sick-looking rat struggling across the deck. Everyone knew how rat poison worked. The rats got thirsty after eating it so they went back to the nest where they died of thirst and then the others would eat them, and the others would get poisoned and die of thirst and new rats would eat them.

Margaret took a long sip from the lukewarm cup of peppermint tea she was drinking. Heidi was angry about the government. She was right to be. They were all doing as much as they could. Protesting and writing letters, and they’d stopped buying as much, but it wasn’t enough. That was the tough part of being forty-eight. At twenty-four or even thirty-six, you could fool yourself that it might make a difference. That if you tried this one last thing it might make a difference. But now Margaret and Heidi and all the people they knew had tried everything and time was running out – now more than ever before. With every day it seemed like there was less and less they could do on the small scale of their homes and selves. Heidi realised this. It was just that at the moment she was wound up, energised by the anger that nothing they did could change anything properly – it might have, but it hadn’t. It was time for big change and no one who could make big change would.

‘I said we’d go,’ Heidi said. That was how it worked – the keeping living. None of them were ever broken on the same day – not completely. Margaret and Heidi were like a couple of hikers stuck up in the mountains freezing to death. One of them would say, ‘I’m tired. I’m going to take off my clothes now and go to sleep,’ and the other would say, ‘No. Wait. Half a k more.’

Margaret nodded. ‘Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. Let me know if I can do anything.’

‘We’re making signs on Sunday,’ Heidi said.

‘Right,’ Margaret said. She didn’t say what she was thinking. That making signs seemed like activity for activity’s sake, that signs were not going to save anyone. She just said ‘Right’ because that’s how the keeping going worked. Heidi did not need to know what Margaret thought about the signs because Heidi knew the signs were a waste of time.

‘It’s not about the signs,’ said Heidi.

‘No,’ said Margaret. ‘It’s about the hanging out together and making the signs.’