I picked up my phone. The screen blurred, my eyes so tired I couldn’t see straight, but I found Lina’s name and I texted her, suggested we have lunch. It was barely dawn, but she replied too quickly, like she’d been waiting, and my stomach churned with guilt, so hot I nearly threw up.

7 MONDAY, APRIL

7

MONDAY, APRIL

I’d known her for so long that I could barely remember not knowing her, but the woman sitting opposite me in one of Sydney’s hundred vaguely Irish-themed inner-city pubs, picking at her Caesar salad, was a stranger. She wore a navy shift dress and a baby pink cardigan and her hair was chocolate brown and swishy, blunt at the ends. I wanted to tell her it looked nice but I didn’t want to hear the disappointed sigh as she pointed out it had been that way for months. Maybe it had.

I was late—deliberately, because I didn’t want to arrive first and have to wait alone among the crowd of cheap suits and sensibly priced shoes and expensive fragrances—and when she hugged me it was too tight, too forceful. She smelled like vanilla and money and I tasted anger, with a guilt chaser.

‘So they’ve spent weeks installing this new system at work,’ she was saying, between bites of her salad, holding her water glass like it was wine. ‘It went live this morning and all the scheduled reminders have disappeared.’

‘Oh no,’ I said, more in response to her tone than her words, which flew past me without making contact. She’d been talking since we sat down, filling every awkward silence with an observation, about the pub or the weather or the construction work outside—all the meaningless things. It made the guilt bubble up from my gut into my throat.

‘So, guess who gets to go through every single patient file and manually re-enter their next check-up date so we can get the reminders out?’

Lina was a receptionist for a chain of dentists, had been for years. Originally, she’d worked in their Parramatta practice, but a few years ago she’d transferred into the city. We’ll see each other all the time, she’d said, and at first we had. She came to Redfern for drinks or I met her near Central for breakfast, and we had coffee every Monday near Wynyard, because the barista was cute and she thought he liked me. Not that you’d ever date a barista, she’d joked, faintly bitter.

‘Crap,’ I said, taking a long sip of my beer, putting it down and looking too intently at the label.

She shrugged. ‘It happens.’ She made a face. ‘Oh God, and remember Nicole? The dental assistant I’ve told you about? With the boobs?’

I didn’t remember, but I nodded anyway.