Soon there were sounds outside, a person’s voice. Her door opened and she was hauled out by her underarms, and shakily she stood and glared at the sun. There was a policeman beside her, looking at her face, her forehead, saying something. Sirens in the distance. The policeman was nodding to the grass––asking her to sit down? She kept running her hands over her belly. Her grief was such that she could not sit.

When she woke she instinctively looked for her husband in the empty space beside her. She’d dreamed of Mark again. That he’d been born. That she’d got to hold him. There was a poster on the wall of some woman draped over the front of a car, grinning like some possum snarling in the dark. Wearing knee-high boots. Margie’s boy’s room. She rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling. Stains in each corner, the fan dusty. She was too old for this now, fighting like this. It was childish. She sighed and kicked off the doona.

Margie wasn’t up yet, often wouldn’t rise until eight at least. With her husband dead and her boy moved to Trenton as an electrician, Margie had given up all reason to live besides gossip. And you didn’t need to wake up early to catch gossip.

Penelope sat up and swung her feet around. She hadn’t brought her slippers, in her rush to leave, and so padded barefoot on the carpet to the bathroom across the hallway. She showered. When she was ready to leave, and had her towel wrapped around her and her hair up in another, she wiped her hand across the mirror and stared at her weathered reflection. Wanted to scold herself, force herself to look at who she’d become, truly. After getting dressed she walked to the kitchen.

She ate a bowl of cornflakes, seated at the meagre, laminex table, the same table William Kelly had sat at yesterday, being polite with his words but judging her with his thoughts, she knew. She thought of her husband and the way he had looked when she left him alone in their house. She looked at the bowl of cereal, the spoon hovering before her lips. She searched the orange flakes for something. He was stuck to her like tar. Without him she was less of herself and she wondered if he felt the same.

Margie soon approached from her bedroom. With her blue dressing gown flowing about her she looked both elegant and whale-like, slow-moving and graceful. Her stomach collided with the kitchen bench and she grimaced, grabbed at it.

‘You alright?’ Penelope asked.

‘I’m okay, I’m okay. Gosh, that hurt,’ she said. She opened the fridge, prepared her cornflakes. ‘So Phyllis called me this morning with some more news about your man.’

Always the feigned delight when she spoke about another’s misfortune, even those she cared for. ‘Yeah?’ Penelope asked. ‘What’s that?’

‘Well, Phyllis said she was talking to Julia, and you know Julia. She’s friends with Ruth. Married to Jack?’