Two young people dead on the floor of a shitty dive bar, their faces in the grease and grime of a tiny kitchen. Their deathbed was run by underqualified short-order cooks who’d left after dinner service without so much as a sweep up of the dead cockroaches under the sticky counters. It was such a waste.

Bartending had been a tougher job than I’d thought it would be when I started out in the industry as an eighteen-year-old. I’d been sucked in by the apparent glamour of the pubs and clubs in Sydney’s CBD, the thumping music and the drunk girls flirting with the fit young guys behind the crowded counters. The illusion wore off pretty quickly. I finished work in the early hours exhausted and reeking of cigarette smoke, my feet sore and my ears ringing with the same soulless tunes thrumming out from the DJ’s stand over and over. The girls flirted with me, sure, but they were half as charming when I was tired and sober as they seemed when I was on the serving side of the bar. For every long-legged beauty who tried to get free shots from me there were four angry men who felt overlooked in the line and let me know it in no uncertain terms. The vomit and piss all over the bathrooms, swimming with cigarette butts and used condoms, were suddenly my responsibility.

No one was supposed to work in places like this for very long. It was a place for backpackers to drop in and grind out some cash to fund their way north toward Thailand, a place for locals to dwell for a while before they laced up their boots and got out into the real working world. This filthy, rotting place was supposed to be a launch pad only, a rest stop on the way to better things. The only people who were supposed to dent its benches and bar stools would be the local drunks and long-haul truckers who’d already given up on young people’s dreams. The small ghosts of Andrew and Keema would be out of place here in the silent hours. They’d be confused, bright-eyed spirits still wiping the counters and changing the kegs, so unprepared to be dead that they didn’t even know that they were. I held the photo of the young people drinking on the porch and felt sad.

Sweeney appeared beside me, her face still quizzical.

“How’s your case?” she asked. I remembered her trying to ask me questions about my arrest back when I first met her. I didn’t want to be interrogated on it now, standing by the cooling bodies of two kids. So I just shrugged.

“Is that what this is about?” She looked at the gash in my cheek. “Are vigilantes still messing with you?”

“No,” I said. “It was just a pub fight over something stupid. A snooker table. It’s fine. It’s all fine. Thanks for asking.”