Dell and Peggy laughed. Meetings were full of damaged goods. Anyone who appealed to them wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole. Peggy and Greta were making money out of sex and had been raped horribly so would be happy if a man never came within ten feet of them again. Dell and Heidi usually slept with women, which made what Heidi was doing with Ian even more confusing. There were women in the meetings, but Dell was having nice casual sex and wasn’t looking for anything. They’d all seen what had happened to Heidi. A lot of people were sleeping with each other in the meetings. People would arrive together. There was a bit of intrigue, because it wasn’t totally a good idea. When two alcoholics got together, shit got intense. That was how someone had described it to Peggy and Greta. It worked sometimes but rarely. Usually one of them would drink. There was some weird psychic antagonising agent when two alcoholics slept together. Suspicion, passion, rage, obsession. It was usually a bad combination.

None of them had been to anything social to do with the meetings. Ever. There was plenty going on. Except bowling. Peggy and Greta had gone bowling, but not really. A group of young people went bowling. Peggy and Greta had agreed they never wanted to go bowling, but they went and it was okay. They talked to a few people and it was okay. The bowling was okay. Someone paid for them to go and then someone bought them a Coke and they sat around and then, before you knew it, there was another day. Another day closer to death, they’d say to each other and laugh. But it was a good way to waste time.

Saturdays sucked. There was no work and walking around was depressing because the streets were weirdly lonely and the parks were packed with families with kids. The weekends dragged and there were only two meetings in town and another one too far away for them to get to.

‘Maybe we should go?’ Dell said. She missed Heidi and wouldn’t go by herself.

Peggy and Greta put their lips together and raised their eyebrows high like they were kind of surprised about it and nodded.

Greta climbed her hand down the flier. ‘It says you have to bring a plate.’ It was a curse of being sober. Everywhere you went you had to bring a plate. Alcoholics loved food. Greta and Peggy brought chips. Dell brought bread. They were vegetarian, so it usually meant they ate chips sandwiched between slices of bread at the potluck meals.

‘We could make a quiche,’ Greta said, like she was the bravest person on the planet.

‘Really?’ Dell said, then, ‘How the fuck do you make a quiche?’ Dell had eaten them before, they all had, but they thought they were made in some special quiche factory and only sold to bakeries.