Tomorrow was just another day.

9

I sat on Mum’s old squeaky bed, my tea on the box growing cold, feeling paralysed again. Inert. I’d used up all my energy fighting off that other inertia – the panic-stricken urge to put my head in the sand and do nothing when those two stripes had hollered at me from that little plastic stick. But I hadn’t done nothing then. I had mustered some strange energy from somewhere and I had done something instead. I had acted. That had to be good, didn’t it? Doing nothing would have meant this thing taking off on its own, continuing this process it had begun in the middle of me, growing and swelling until I couldn’t touch my toes, until it became a baby, of all ridiculous things. No, I had acted. I had put a plan in place. A package was on its way here. I had got myself here to meet it. The plan was sound.

I pulled my knees up and hugged them to my chest, as if to remind myself that I still could, and, looking at the chaos and filth surrounding me, tried to summon that enthusiasm again.

I still hadn’t managed it when I heard the car. Standing and peering through the grimy glass of the little bedroom window I watched a small white hatchback drive in – too fast, it seemed – and pull up suddenly in the gravel patch on the driveway. The car door opened and a short woman with a neat dark ponytail stepped out. She retrieved a small grey toolbox from inside the car and headed towards the back door of the house.

I could hear Bette’s and the woman’s voices in the kitchen outside my door. They were talking softly, too softly to hear what they were saying. Nearly whispering, in fact.

I sat for a while longer and then ventured to the bedroom door and opened it. I leaned my head out. Bette was sitting on the bench seat with her arm on the table, and the woman, maybe about Mum’s age, maybe a bit younger, sat on a stool pulled up opposite her. There was a lamp on the table angled down onto Bette’s arm, and the woman had her face bent over it. Bette looked up and said slowly, ‘Hello, love. You hungry? There are some biscuits in the cupboard, take whatever you need.’

‘No, I’m okay for now, thanks, Grandma. Just getting a glass of water.’

As I crossed the kitchen to get a glass, the woman looked up. ‘So you’re Anna?’ she said.

I startled a little at her use of my name.

‘Yes, oh, hello.’ I held my hand out to shake. But the woman gestured with her head to her hands, which wore pale blue sterile latex gloves and were busy with dressings and tape. ‘Nurse hands,’ she said.

‘Oh wow, Grandma,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

Bette’s arm, for the first time since I had arrived, was out of its shirtsleeve, bandages unravelled on the table beside them. A white dressing stained sticky red and brown took up most of Bette’s forearm. ‘Oh nothing. Just a stupid thing. A careless burn.’