‘G’day, everyone, I’m Geoff,’ Geoff said, as though he really was in a room full of people he’d never met. ‘I’m thirty-four and I’m a plumber. Nice to see you all here.’

‘Hi, I’m Beryl. My fourth great-grandchild was born this week. A little boy called Ajax.’ She sounded so pleased, and we all made the requisite noises, assuming we’d heard the name wrong.

‘Hi, guys. I’m still Fran. And I’m still a teacher.’

Geoff frowned, concerned she was taking the piss.

‘Louise. I’m thirty-seven and I like to bake.’ Louise had a different hobby every week. So far there’d been knitting, reading detective novels, macramé and rock climbing.

‘Hi, everyone, I’m Donna and I like cats.’

‘Caitlin,’ I said. A long silence followed, sixteen eyes looking at me, waiting to hear my fun fact. ‘I’m a waitress.’ I used that one a lot.

‘Okay,’ Fiona said. ‘No new faces tonight, so that makes things easier.’

In the year or so I’d been coming, there had been a lot of new faces. Most only came once. They were sent by doctors or shrinks or their local mental health service, but you didn’t need a referral and it was free, right down to the tea and coffee, so occasionally we’d get tourists. Most of them made their way here via Facebook, where a post by a bemused and horrified one-time visitor had gone viral and seen us labelled the Morbids.

Death was huge on Facebook, if you knew where to look.

Geoff was a member of fourteen different Facebook groups about death—local groups, Australian groups, groups specifically for the potential victims of domestic accident, for tracking the spread of flu—and he’d joined and left dozens more. Some treated it too much like a joke, some too seriously (they’re so bloody depressing, he’d complain), some expected members to contribute too much to every conversation and some were so quiet they felt like everyone in them had already been buried. You need to find your people, he said once, after telling us how he’d left a group because they focused too much on funeral planning. Some he encouraged us to join, offering to invite us, but online groups weren’t for me. I liked being in a room, seeing faces and knowing that these people didn’t exist anywhere outside these four beige walls.

I didn’t even know their last names.