‘How does it play out, though?’ Dell blew on her coffee. ‘We call. He maybe answers. We ask if we can talk to her. He says no, we worry. He says yes, we talk to her. She tells us how great things are going. And’ – she fished around in the coffee for something with her pinky finger – ‘we worry.’

‘I think she’s been here,’ Greta said.

Dell and Peggy looked at her.

‘Some of your stockings were in the laundry – like, for ages – and when we got home today they were gone.’

No one else had moved them. Peggy and Greta had thought about it. They liked the stockings. They were thick denier and black. They looked warm. They’d just got a floral dress from work; the stockings would be great with it. The only leggings they had were the stripy thermals which were footless and melted, now. They only had seven socks. None matched. They’d held the stockings as they hung in the laundry. Run them through their hands, thinking how good they’d look with the dress and Converses. But they hadn’t taken them. At any moment like that, Greta and Peggy would hold their hands out, like scales. They’d look at one hand: ‘Stockings.’ Then the other hand: ‘Dying drunk in a ditch – alone.’ They’d make a weighing-up action. Sometimes dying drunk would still look good, so they’d add something to it. ‘After being raped,’ Greta would say, and if that still didn’t work, Peggy would say, ‘Anally.’ ‘By a roomful of men.’ Eventually, not stealing the stockings would win – or not stealing the electricity money, or the lunch in the fridge at work, or the shampoo that Dell and Heidi left in the shower. They usually had to put something that had really happened to them in the mix. They talked about how they both worried that one day even that wouldn’t work.

Dell looked at Peggy.

‘We didn’t take them,’ Peggy said. Dell believed them – and, realistically, she wouldn’t have cared that much. Carol had told Dell and Heidi that honesty was fluid. That it shouldn’t be rigid.

They all looked at each other a moment longer, then Dell put her cup down next to where she was sitting, and they all stood up.

Dell and Heidi’s room was off the lounge and not very big. The four of them had flipped a coin for the bedroom that was off the dining room and kitchen, and Peggy and Greta had won. No one had said it but everyone was pretty sure the damp dark room was not a win, but that was how they sorted out that Heidi and Dell could have the room off the lounge which had a window and slightly less mould than the other one.