When they were tiny, like, really small, there had been a very hot summer and all the mothers took all the babies to the paddling pool in the Botanical Gardens. The story went that everyone was sunburnt before they reached the end of their street. The pushchairs were all made of metal, they didn’t even have cushions in them. They weren’t adjustable except the back of the seat could be dropped to lying down. Being a baby wasn’t meant to be a cakewalk. Neither was being a mother. Peggy and Greta weren’t particularly wanted. When mothers like theirs were angry this is what they would tell daughters like Peggy and Greta. ‘I never wanted to have a baby. But I did my best.’ And they did, except when they didn’t. Mothers like Peggy and Greta’s were not happy about Peggy and Greta getting sober. Neither were fathers like Peggy and Greta’s, or brothers like theirs, or any of the girls at the parlour or the married men they’d been sleeping with before they got sober. Greta and Peggy felt very alone. ‘If it wasn’t for you,’ they’d say to each other as the sun came up. As they got on their knees and begged for one more day sober, as they picked up ashtrays at the meetings in the old stone building by the grassy square. ‘If it wasn’t for you,’ with their eyes, with their heart, to god – to say thanks. ‘You’ve taken almost everything,’ they’d say in their braver moments to something that was powerful and terrifying, that they couldn’t understand, something like the big hills, ‘but thank you for giving me her.’

When they got to the wide avenue at the end of their street, Greta slowed. She looked down the tree-lined footpath. ‘We could go to the Krishnas?’ she said. ‘It’s heaps cheaper.’

Peggy thought about it. ‘All that fucking chanting, though.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ Greta said. ‘It’s good for us. Probably.’

‘I really want tom yum. We’re sort of all prepped for tom yum.’

‘Yeah,’ Greta said. ‘But we should go to the Krishnas next week.’

‘If we’re alive.’ Peggy pushed the button on the traffic light so they could cross. ‘If you and I – or one of us – is still alive next Sunday we’ll go to the Krishnas and eat prasadam and chant like motherfuckers.’

‘But not get married,’ Greta said. A woman they knew had gone into the Hare Krishnas and been married to a man, and then she’d left the Hare Krishnas. Every woman who married this man left. They left and the Hare Krishnas found him another wife. No one had seen her since she got married. Peggy and Greta had no idea if she’d left the Krishnas, they just heard from someone. There was a lot of that – gossip, intrigue. Things were boring without drinking.