‘Don’t you want this place to be nice?’ he shouted at me.

‘I do.’ I certainly did.

‘They could have given us more than three cans of godforsaken soup.’

‘We don’t know if they are soup.’

‘What I mean is that they are not even putting in a bit of effort. In the training offices in town they have two working computers. What do we have?’

I double-tapped the postcard.

*

There was possible room for promotion at the garage and that possibility nearly drove Kevin demented. I was done with trying. There was nothing to do and I didn’t feel like doing it. Just stay alive – that was my job. But Kevin was starving. Management knew just how to send him sky-high with outrageous promises and complete lack of follow-through. I said it was tacky to want to succeed at an imaginary job. I liked to be honest when I felt it was needed.

Kevin said he wished I paid the same level of care and attention to everything in the garage as I paid to the plant, which I watered daily. The plant had been introduced in the summer as a new level of responsibility. It was the sole living thing in our stockless gloom. It was green, as plants usually are, but it had a touch of the exotic about it. It was in my interest to keep it out of the sun and away from the greedy birds.

‘Stop cuddling the plant,’ Kevin often suggested.

‘I’m just holding it,’ I lied. I liked to have it in my hands, my fingers wrapped delicately around its black plastic casing. If pushed, I probably would have admitted to feeling some kind of kinship with the plant: there were hundreds of things we didn’t understand about the world and there wasn’t a person alive interested in telling us. Poor short and squat fellow.

Kevin blamed my passivity for our slow days. I was a human scarecrow: a strange woman, wild-haired, with end-of-the-world eyes. What town could not turn away from that? Despite his calm exterior, he was capable of great crabbiness. He screamed questions at the blameless sky. He shook the petrol pumps as if he alone could outwit their emptiness. ‘We must be profitable,’ he said to nobody in particular.

‘Why do you move like that?’ he asked once.

‘It’s a walk I’m trying. It’s only recent. Do you like it?’

‘It honestly looks like there is something wrong with you.’

‘There is something wrong with me,’ I said. ‘When I was a child I grew at an advanced rate. My mother took me to the doctor to measure my arms and legs and they are actually two inches longer than they should be.’

I had ways of silencing Kevin, ways of forcing him to stare rigidly into the distance as if being near me required great strength. He was a young person given to habitual fits of insanity and nervy implosions. I passed several weeks simply following his erratic, slippery shadow through the glass as he stalked the garage floor. He needed to get over his moods, sharpish. But I worried about Kevin. I did. I worried about people, desperately. It took up a huge amount of my daily hours. I didn’t ask to be that kind of woman but that’s just the way it worked out. The reason I ended up in the garage was clear: I was being punished in a sluggish, work-shy way by the universe and, honestly, it just made me laugh.