‘Okay!’ Ruby called back, then she whispered to Paula, ‘Mum worries the welfare people will take Jye off her. We’ll be right. She’s working herself up to leave soon.’

Ruby grabbed a beer from the fridge and walked out of the kitchen.

By the time Paula returned to the living room, Nicole had retreated to sit next to Jye, Ruby was perched on the arm of the couch and Curtis sat in the chair drinking the beer.

Paula set up her medical bag on the table and pulled out the supplies she needed. As she would with any patient, she talked Wigney through what she was going to do at each step of the process.

‘There’ll be a bit of a sting when I put in the local anaesthetic.’

‘Yeah, whatever. Dad’s tough, isn’t he, Jye?’

Jye nodded.

Paula used the saline from her medical bag to irrigate the wound, flushing out the debris. ‘How long since you had a tetanus shot, Mr Wigney?’

‘Oh … shit. Dunno.’

‘Well, all that rusty stuff in a wrecker’s yard—good idea to update your tetanus. I’ve got some in my bag.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’ Then he turned his head to have a decent look at Paula, not sure if he should be suspicious. ‘So how long you been living down here, doc?’

‘I’m not living here. I’m only temporary. Leaving on Monday,’ she explained.

That idea seemed to relax him, and while Paula stitched his head laceration, Curtis Wigney blathered on about his business plan to fix up cars and sell them. That was why he’d driven to the wrecker’s yard, looking for automotive parts.

‘I’m trying to get some cash together but it’s always hard,’ he said. ‘Even if some people don’t understand how fucking hard it is.’ Wigney glared at Nicole and pointed to his head laceration with a hand gesture as if pointing a gun. ‘See this, Nicole? This is what I go through trying to get cash for this family.’

‘I know,’ she replied.

‘Do you? I don’t reckon you do fucking know.’

Curtis shot Nicole a look so vicious it seemed to make the woman shrivel deeper inside her oversized clothes.

Wigney then aimed his hand, still shaped like a gun, at Paula’s bag.

‘Bet you got lots of goodies in there, doc.’

‘Ah. Well, some,’ she said. ‘Keep still, please.’

As Paula continued stitching, she considered what goodies she might have in her bag that she could inject into Curtis Wigney in place of a tetanus vaccine. But then she blocked that line of thought. She mustn’t let her imagination wander that way, even as a silly fantasy. Instead, she tried to focus on the task, the feel of the suture needle piercing the skin of the man’s forehead, the thread pulling the jagged fleshy edges of the wound together into as neat a pink line as she could manage.