I didn’t want to die. I hadn’t wanted it then and I didn’t want it now—none of us did. I just knew I would. I wasn’t as sure of anything as I was of the fact that I was going to die, that it should have happened already and it was only a matter of time.

We were all so sure.

Except we were so rarely right.

Frannie didn’t have cancer. She might develop it from the sheer number of scans she got, but so far she was clear. Carlos didn’t even have a driver’s licence. When Paulie died of a massive heart attack just before Christmas we were all shocked, much more shocked than we probably should have been. He was overweight, smoked a pack a day and his cholesterol was through the roof, but he’d been waiting for an industrial accident (he worked for a printer—in sales, but still).

And yet, we watched and we waited and we ran over our lives with a fine-tooth comb, confused and frustrated and anxious. Trying to outwit it, whatever it was, before it could kill us.

Pretend I didn’t say this, Paulie said once, only weeks before his myocardial infarction, but I reckon I’m safer for having spent all this time thinking about it. I’ve imagined sticking my hand in a trimmer so many times that when I’m near one I’m the most careful bloke in the room. The guys who are going to do it are the guys who don’t think about it, don’t see it coming.

And we all nodded and promptly pretended he hadn’t said it, because then it wouldn’t work.

We finished up a little earlier than usual, and I was grateful to escape. I had a headache—the same one I’d had for months, probably a tumour—and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.

‘You’re quiet today, Caitlin,’ Geoff said, when my eyes hadn’t lit up at Louise’s story about being followed out of a bottle shop the weekend before.

Geoff was our unofficial leader. Officially, we were part of a ‘unique first-step program for treatment of anxiety, specifically as related to death and dying, led by a team of qualified mental health professionals’, but over the years, long before my time, those mental health professionals had been downgraded from psychiatrists to psychologists to counsellors, and then we’d been palmed off onto a series of nurses, most of whom started off with dreams of fixing us but left within months, defeated and disappointed.