‘An alcoholic will steal your wallet and an addict will steal your wallet then help you look for it.’ They would both laugh. Every time. Remembering the punchline was one thing but remembering how it felt was another thing altogether. They had talked about it one night. Someone else had told the joke. They’d heard it from another room. They were at Diane’s house. A dinner, maybe it was someone’s birthday. Not the day they were born on, but the anniversary of the day they got sober, or the last day they drank, or the first meeting they came to. Those birthdays were big. Cakes, candles and a potluck dinner like this. Greta and Peggy brought chips. One bag. Dell brought some bread from a bakery at the mall but hadn’t brought any butter, but Diane had some. Diane’s house was really nice. She’d been sober for over ten years, which seemed ridiculous. The house was so cool.

‘If we had a house,’ Peggy said, ‘it would be exactly like Diane’s.’ It was an old villa with a really nice kitchen and the bedroom was painted forest green – dark, like you were sleeping out in the bush.

‘Like witches, like,’ Greta said. The lounge didn’t have a TV. There wasn’t a TV in the whole house. Hardly any of them had TVs. ‘The drug of the nation’, someone had said, but Peggy and Greta were pretty sure it was because they were always at meetings when anything decent was on TV.

The lounge was decorated with amazing things. Diane knew artists and there was art on the walls, original pieces of art. Peggy and Greta had started going to the art gallery and getting books out of the library about art. Out of everything, they probably wanted to be artists. Diane said the people she knew who were artists had gone to university. Peggy and Greta didn’t have University Entrance. Diane said they could ring the local high school and ask about what they would have to do to get University Entrance. The person they talked to said they needed to get School Certificate first. There were night classes. They’d got the high school to send them booklets about it, but it seemed unlikely. Then Erin and Kitty told them about Workbridge. Erin and Kitty had gone to Workbridge and now they were doing a course. It was work-based training. They were working at the electronics factory, learning how to solder.

‘Can anyone ring them?’ Peggy and Greta asked.

‘Anyone who’s on the sickness benefit,’ Kitty and Erin said. If the work-based training worked out, Kitty and Erin would have a job. It felt a bit like a shortcut. Shorter than the whole School Certificate thing.

‘We’re on the sickness benefit,’ Peggy and Greta said.