Geoff sat opposite me. He’d been coming for longer than I had—as long as the group had been going. When Donna said the thing about the train seat, his eyes had widened, and he’d turned to Frannie next to him and said, ‘God, I never thought of that. What a way to go.’ His voice was full of fear, but also wonder at this new toy to store in his brain box, ready to pull out when his favourite—domestic accident, the more unlikely the better—got boring.

We all had our favourites.

Frannie’s was cancer, Carlos’s vehicular. Louise had only been coming for a couple of months but it was obvious she was expecting something violent yet premeditated—a stalker or an ex-partner or her childhood enemy.

Mine was mugging gone wrong. Wrong place, wrong time type stuff, killed in a moment of panic or by accident—sexual violence of varying degrees optional, currently waning in frequency.

Some of us had more than one, a primary and a secondary. Louise’s secondary was cancer; Geoff’s was bad flu. He got his flu shot every year but that only protected you from last year’s strains, he told us, over and over.

My secondary was freak accident, not domestic: a shop awning collapsing, unsecured load flying off a truck, lighting rig coming loose from a nightclub ceiling. The kind of thing that would make the news not because it was tragic, but because it was so unexpected, the kind of thing the rest of us would watch on TV and think, Ooooh … good one.

The primary was the one you thought about all the time, that you’d almost accepted as inevitable. The secondary was more an uncomfortable niggle, a reason to cross the road but not to stay home.

‘My shoulder’s been sore for a couple of days,’ Frannie was saying. ‘I did help Owen move the fridge on Saturday, but I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s my lymph nodes.’

‘Ohhhh, that’s pretty advanced then. Sorry, hon.’ Donna’s eyes were damp, though it was hard to tell if she was worried for Frannie or herself.

Sometimes people came and they thought we were freaks, that we delighted and revelled in this. Some days I wondered if they were right. I looked at the beige faces, beige hands around their lukewarm cups, and I thought terrible uncharitable thoughts. But then I remembered the first time I’d felt it, walking through the park to my old house in Glebe, glitter in my hair and a horrible sound ringing in my ears. The way my heart had shifted in my chest and I’d felt it so strongly, like a friend walking next to me, arm around my shoulders—heavy and hot and smelling of rot, impossible to ignore. Not a friend at all.