Their bags land on the carousel, which starts moving, startling him to his feet. He laughs, looking at her. She blinks, staring ahead as her suitcase approaches. As their cases arrive, pressed close together, he reaches for hers, first, and drops it by her feet. ‘Later,’ he says. As he turns away from her, she catches his scent. It’s like a summer. The smell of stepping into a hot greenhouse. That night, Cathy smells it suddenly on her, on her arms, and sniffs and sniffs until it’s gone.

33.

Joe

Joe is back home, and back to work, as though none of it ever happened. He’s in the backroom, which runs along the width of the building behind the consultation rooms that open out on to it, centrifuging blood, and making a coffee, and being careful not to mix the two up. He held his breath this morning while drawing this blood. The metallic smell of it. Sharp and cloying. He’d almost been sick.

‘Yum, blood and coffee,’ Frannie says as she drifts by. She has no shoes on, and is carrying a can of Coke.

‘Might check my coffee for diseases,’ he says, and he hears Frannie’s laugh bloom as she reaches the reception.

He did bloodwork on his first work experience, much to his disappointment. He wanted to treat animals, and instead he processed results for two weeks. He still remembers now, seventeen-year-old Joe, who hadn’t yet grown into his nose, peering through the window into the treatment room, hoping for a glance of a cat or a dog.

Evan comes in through Consultation Room One. Joe’s back stiffens. He can’t be bothered with Evan at the best of times, but especially not today. He glumly dribbles milk into his coffee and tries to ignore him. Evan is good at client care, Cathy tells him all the time. He hardly ever has to write down a bill, never gets complaints. ‘That is because he is a fake,’ Joe had said a few weeks ago, deadpan, and Frannie had barked out a laugh. ‘He’s not a fake,’ she’d said, laughing. ‘He’s totally upfront about what a twat he is.’

Evan is a terrible medicine vet. That’s the truth of it. He’s okay at surgery, has steady hands and can talk the talk, but that’s about it.

‘We can’t bully the only non-Plant,’ Cathy had said with a sigh.

Joe moves across the office, away from the spinning blood and the freshly made coffee, and begins signing a worming prescription for a cockapoo. Something about the sterile snap of the lemon disinfectant, the coffee, the mostly mundane list of problems: vaccinations for cats and dogs, conjunctivitis, Labradors having eaten knickers – these things are comforting to him after the blood and terror of Verona.

Cathy is in Room Three, directly behind him. Frannie is out front, on reception. It’s their mother’s day off, but she will probably come in at some point, almost always does. Cathy’s dog Macca is sleeping in the corner.