I wasn’t surprised at the news. That was the strangest thing. I should have been, but I wasn’t. We’d been worried about Jeannie for so long. Her mood swings. Her drinking. Her erratic behaviour. We were even more worried about Eliza. We kept encouraging her to go to uni. We offered to pay her tuition fees, cover her living expenses. We thought it would be good to get Eliza away from her mother for a while. We hoped that having space to herself would help Jeannie find some peace, to stop drinking, to maybe seek treatment for her anguished mind.

I knew Jeannie hadn’t been sleeping properly for months. She’d rung me, four weeks before she died. We were arranging Eliza’s trip to New Zealand, that was why I rang her, but we were soon talking about her, not Eliza. She hated her local doctor. ‘Suspicious eel-faced bat of a woman’ was how she described her. I remember it because I remember thinking ‘eel-faced bat’ was a wonderful insult. Jeannie was always able to come up with great insults.

JEANNIE, SWINGING ABOVE: Thank you. I liked that one too.

MAXIE: Jeannie had been to see her about her insomnia. She told me she’d begged for help. Explained she’d been worrying about Eliza’s exam results, about her leaving to go to uni. Said she just needed a bit of help to get through this bump, then she’d be back sleeping naturally again in no time. But the doctor was no fan of sleeping pills. She thought they were addictive. Dangerous. Jeannie couldn’t afford to go to Melbourne to find another doctor. She knew there were alerts about doctor shopping, anyway. If she could just get a few good nights’ sleep, though, she’d be a different woman, she told me. Had I ever experienced the horror of long-term insomnia? she asked me.

She knew I had. I’d told her about it the year before. During a tense time at work, I’d had terrible sleep problems. One of the producers had come to my rescue. She’d been prescribed very strong sleeping pills and still had some left. They worked wonders, she said. She gave me her leftovers. Use them sparingly, she warned me. I’d only needed three of them. So when Jeannie told me she needed help, I was able to say, ‘Let me send you something. These are fantastic. But be careful with them.’