‘The other day I was in a shopping centre and they were doing that thing, you know, where the lady walks around with the little cups of chicken? So many people took them. It’s crazy. You don’t know when it was cooked or how it was stored or anything. I mean, maybe salmonella isn’t a big deal for most people, but if you’re immunocompromised it could kill you. E. coli. All that stuff. And I mean, chicken? They pump those birds so full of hormones it’s making girls go into puberty early, you know? Breast cancer rates are nuts.’

Frannie flinched at that. Her bandages were long gone but she wore long sleeves and, despite the heat, she kept pulling at them with her hands. When she first saw me she’d frowned, looked worried, and I’d given her a smile to let her know it was okay. We could talk, I thought. Later, maybe.

Somewhere else.

Flynn was eighteen, with big, frizzy hair and ice-blue eyes and a beakish nose he’d be lucky to grow into one day. He talked for a long time, seemingly plucking new theories out of the air, his sentences running on, from hormone-filled chickens to chemtrails to vaccines to a secret government weapons facility a hundred kilometres west of Alice Springs. I could see Geoff making fists in his lap, Carlos’s foot twitching against the leg of his chair.

He didn’t bother me. What he was saying may have sounded ridiculous but I could see the way his eyes flicked around the room. He just wanted someone to talk to, someone who believed him, made him feel normal.

As he spoke, I took my own personal rollcall. Louise, Frannie, Geoff, Carlos. Glenn, Donna. Flynn. Amara, who’d come for a while when I first started—murder, most likely by serial killer—and Chris, who I didn’t know but was worried about terrorist attacks.

All the same, telling all the same stories.

Beryl was gone.

Not dead; just stopped coming. Carlos helped her with her shopping every Friday, he told me during a break—Evelyn liked breaks; she believed in ‘resetting the room’—and she was doing fine, better than fine. He told me she’d met someone—Neville, who’d been a biker in the seventies and had tattoos on his fingers. Neville had come along on her last night, admitted that he’d made some mistakes in his day but he’d served his time and now he was focused on making Beryl happy. She thought she was going to live to a hundred, at least.

I had a feeling she was right.

And something else had changed. It took me a while to figure out, but when I did it was like it was the clearest thing in the world, like I’d known it all along, from the second I’d decided to come back.