They’d stand in line for breakfast, holding up the queue, looking at the bain-maries. ‘Do we like marmalade?’ Peggy would ask. Greta would shrug. They didn’t know if they’d ever had marmalade. ‘I think it’s nice with peanut butter,’ someone behind them said. ‘If you can get one of the crusts from the toast and put, like, peanut butter and marmalade on it. I reckon that would be nice.’ They tried it, and she was right. You had to take other people’s advice. That’s what they learned. Their thinking was a bit broken in regard to a lot of things. It was like trying to fix a broken machine with the same broken machine. That’s what the counsellors told them at rehab.

But when they’d got back to town and paid the bond for the flat and before the credit card had been cut up, they’d bought some clothes out of the big bins in the secondhand store on one of the roads that led out to the port. You could fill a bag for five dollars. The bag was splitting a bit at the sides, but the person taking their money looked at their tracksuits and let it pass. They wouldn’t get their faces re-pierced. It was too expensive and their body was kind of in revolt. It was as if the alcohol and drugs had been keeping a whole bunch of infections at bay. Both of them got thrush and eczema and nits. They would walk to the after-hours in the dark, late at night, having come to their wits’ end with the scratching after spending all day telling each other they could handle it. Chemists were dangerous but there was a small photo of them behind the counter that said they were drug-seekers. So that was helpful.

Two weeks after they started at the warehouse, they went to the computers at the dole office and typed ‘1994 – present: Warehouse Contractor’ into their CV and clicked Save. It was a really happy day. They walked next door to the café and got a huge cup of coffee each, and then another one, then another. Peggy was pretty sure they were going to drink until they got an effect. They loved coffee so much.

They sat in the lounge now with their cups of coffee looking at the place in the room where a TV would have gone.

‘Should we try calling his place?’ Greta said, finally.

Dell looked at her. Then at the ground.

‘It would at least be good to know if we needed to get another flatmate,’ Peggy said. It was the wrong thing to say, but it was said now. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’