According to Patrick, our last nurse who’d only made it to the six-week mark and left just after New Year, we were exhausting and ghoulish. Fiona had been with us ever since, but she spent more and more time doodling at the corners of her notepad, letting us talk among ourselves and nodding at appropriate intervals. I liked Fiona—not that it mattered; I’d liked Bernie, the first one I’d had, too, and Kim and Chris—all of them. They showed up and we let them think they were in charge, but really it was Geoff who led the sessions and asked the questions.

All of this mattered more to Geoff than it did to any of the rest of us. I wasn’t sure why.

And, truthfully, I thought Louise was probably reaching. I knew the bottle shop she was talking about. It was long and narrow and only had one door, so there was no way to leave except to follow someone else. And it was cheap, for Pyrmont, so there was always a steady stream of wine snobs and drunks coming in and out, even on a weekday morning.

Not that I ever bought wine on a weekday morning.

Not often, anyway.

I was standing on the street about to roll a cigarette when Donna came out. In the acid-washed streetlights she looked less beige. Her cardigan was teal and her trousers grey, hair blonde, still crunchy. Inside, I’d thought she was about twenty years older than me, but on the street it was more like ten. She looked like the older sisters of the girls I went to school with—cheap bottle blondes with too-long fingernails painted too-bright colours, breasts tucked into too-small bras and then too-small tops, gold bangles on their wrists and gold hoops in their ears. Multiple. Donna looked like one of them, but camouflaged and corporatised. I could see pinpricks along the curves of her ears where she’d taken out a row of earrings.

‘Want a tailor?’ she asked, holding out her pack.

‘I’m good,’ I said, finding a filter and touching it to my lip twice before letting it rest there as I filled a paper with tobacco. ‘I don’t really like the taste.’

I slipped the filter into the end of the paper, licked the edge and rolled it closed, tapping the end with my index finger, quietly proud of how perfectly cylindrical it was.

She lit her cigarette. I could tell she wanted to say something else but she wasn’t sure where to start, and when Geoff and Carlos pushed through the door she sighed, a mixture of disappointment and relief.

‘Want a lift, Cait?’ Geoff asked, like he did every week.

‘I’m fine,’ I said, like I did every week, putting the rollie between my lips and lighting it. A single strand of tobacco poked out past the filter, and I pinched it out with my fingernails.