Back down the hall, a glance into Nic’s room and with it the concrete loosening nausea swimming in. There was clear space from the door to the stained carpet marking the spot where Nic had lain, leaking.

  Lena continued to the bathroom, stood in the doorway for long minutes staring at the full-to-the-brim bathtub, the cluttered shelves over the sink. The shower stall at least seemed useable. The toilet, too.

  Back out and into the kitchen. She would start with the table to give her some clear space to work with. The closest pile of papers was also the smallest, reaching only to her bellybutton. On top was a flyer asking for help finding a lost bulldog. The pet’s puffy, wet-eyed face looked the way Lena imagined her own did right now. The back of the paper was sticky—Nic had clearly ripped it off a telegraph pole. Why? Had she seen the dog and planned to call the owners? But no, underneath this poster was another: a poodle this time. Below, a lost budgie, a tabby, a Persian. Dogs, birds, cats all the way down. The thought hit Lena like a fist to the chest: had Nic taken all these animals, kept the ‘lost’ posters the way a serial killer collects newspaper clippings of their crimes? Were there live or—Jesus, no—dead animals hidden somewhere in this house?

  Calm down.

  Checking with you as promised: can I chuck the lost pet posters on kitchen table?

  The phone rang immediately. Nic, panting as though she’d run flights of stairs: ‘Leave all that, Lena. I need it.’

  ‘Some of these notices look years old. What do you need them for?’

  Heavy breaths. ‘What if I see one of the pets? I won’t know who to call!’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Lena, they’re out there. Lost. Alone. Probably hungry. How will I know who to call if I find them? Please. Think about it.’

  This Nic—wild with panic, delusion and fear, panting, weeping, helpless, mad—this Nic she could imagine in this house. This Nic she had never met.

  ‘Okay, yes. I get it. It’s fine. I’ll leave them. How are you feeling today?’

  ‘This whole thing is so stupid. You shouldn’t be there. You don’t know what you’re doing. Please, just leave it, okay? Please.’ ‘Yes, yes. Of course. Whatever you want. I’m sorry I upset you. Try to calm down. Drink some water. Maybe have a sleep. It’s all fine, here.’

  ‘Will you leave?’

  ‘Leave?’

  ‘My things. My house. I need you to leave, Lena. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Do you promise?’

  ‘I promise. Don’t worry.’

  She hung up, pushed the stack of posters into a garbage bag, started on the next pile.

  The kitchen cupboards were filled with cookbooks. It was like a history of food trends: The Women’s Weekly Cookbook, Campbell’s Easy Summer Recipes and Margaret Fulton cookbooks Lena remembered from childhood, along with Microwave Cooking With Style, 50 One-pot Meals and In the Kitchen with Rosie: Oprah’s Favorite Recipes. A bunch of low-fat and heart-health books, high-fibre, Mediterranean, low-carb, organic. Some were very recent: paleo and keto. In between were more timeless collections: Italian, Cantonese, Potatoes and Pasta, Vegetarian and Vegan, Soups, Desserts. There was one, still in its plastic wrap, written by an Instagram diet guru Lena had told Nic about only a month or so ago. She imagined her aunt going straight from their lunch together, finding and purchasing the book. Did she think, as she handed over her credit card, about how she’d invite Lena over and surprise her with Caris’s clean-eating feast? Did she think, I’ll just have to tidy the kitchen a little … Did she imagine the two of them in this room, eating slices of Paleo Apple Spice Coffee Cake, their laughter echoing in the clear, empty space that surrounded them?

  She bent and wrenched open the oven. You couldn’t see its walls or racks. Couldn’t see through to the back. Enough paper in there to burn down the neighbourhood.

  People have died of sadness, Lena knew. Was this what it felt like, just before?

  Will, she texted, how have we gone all these years and not known our aunty is completely and utterly batshit crazy?

  Speak for yourself, he replied. I’ve long known EVERYONE in our family is batshit.

  I’m serious tho! There’s a stack of books on feng shui and home decorating stashed … wait for it … behind the DUNNY!

  That’s hilarious

  It’s devastating

  Devastating but hilarious

  Our family motto

  WILL

  Will woke to the stench of stale piss mingled with fresh bleach and the sound of men grunting, boots stomping, meaty hands slapping steel bars. Opened his eyes to light designed to stop you having a single second more sleep than legally mandated. For a woozy moment he thought he was back in prison.

  The moment passed, his head cleared, and he knew he was in a forty-five-dollar single room out the back of a Mackay pub. It was his third morning waking to the eye-watering Queensland sun blitzing through the broken venetians and the racket of FIFO workers using the shared bathroom across the hall.

  Not prison. But not home either. Home (Mercy’s home) smelt like Haymish’s sweet milky morning breath in his face, sounded like Taylah’s attempt at a whisper (louder than her normal speaking voice) saying, Hay, stop bothering them and finish your Rice Bubbles, looked like Mercy’s sleep-crusted eyes fluttering open closed open closed, her lopsided smile twitching as Haymish’s surprising weight landed on the bed, then Taylah’s, and the four of them became one tangled pile of laughter and love. Home was being woken by another man’s kids who felt so like his he forgot to worry about losing them.

  He checked his phone for messages from Mercy and found five from Lena and one from Mum. A voice that could’ve belonged to a screw bellowed from the hall that all rooms needed to be vacated by nine. Will loud-mumbled acknowledgement, became aware as he did so that the toothache he’d had for a week had morphed from dull and intermittent to intense and constant.

  He read through Lena’s texts:

  Remember that pogo ball we used to fight over? STILL HERE

  Big box of floppy disks. Would there even be computers left that can read them?

  Heap of old tapes I think are from our ‘radio show’. Remember??! I think it’s them. Can’t find a working tape deck to check

  Each text made his toothache a little worse and he’d used up the half-pack of codeine he’d brought from home (Mercy’s home) to help him sleep these last three nights.

  FOUR not-working tape decks and counting

  Huge box of tiny tapes from an ANSWERING MACHINE! Not kidding, huge box!! Who keeps answering machine tapes!!! Hours and hours of people saying giveusacallback

  He usually heard Lena’s voice in his head when he read her texts but this last string was silent, toneless, even with the over-punctuation and capitals and shit. He stared at the stripes of sunlight on the lino, tried to figure out if she’d say giveusacallback all breezy and inviting like Dad or stern like Mum. For a while as a kid he’d had a bedroom with venetian blinds like these ones, had enjoyed playing with the angle of the slats to create different line patterns on the floor. He imagined telling that to Haymish and Taylah. That’s what we did for fun back in my day. None of this PlayStation business, just good old-fashioned venetian blind string pulling to keep us entertained. Mercy’d laugh, say, Yeah, those long gone olden days when you were young, and the kids wouldn’t realise she was being cheeky because she was a decade older than Will, would have been married to her ex already when he was a kid flicking the blinds.

  The text from Mum said, Im not going to nag but I really wish youd come home. Rick and I would love to have you here.

  Had to mention Rick the Dick, didn’t she? It’d been the same on the phone yesterday. Will had been seriously considering taking up her offer to buy him a ticket to Brisbane. She’d said all the right things: how she was sorry about Mercy and his job; that she hoped he’d be able to stay in touch with those lovely kids who obviously adored him; that she knew he’d find more work quickly, but maybe this was a good opportunity to head south for a bit and hang out with his old mum. I’ve missed you so much, boyo, she’d said. But then, as if the Dick was standing at her side, poking her ribs, she corrected herself: Rick and I both miss you.

  To which Will had said, Yeah, what does he miss about me? because they’d spent all of five minutes together, for fuck’s sake. The Dick had swept in and taken advantage of Mum while she was still grieving then whisked her and Lena off to Brisbane so fast Will was probably still being processed at Silverwater when their flight was landing. Four months later, when Will was released, he’d spent an unbearable couple of weeks trying to reconnect with Mum and Lena while the Dick lurked around insisting on his importance.

  I know I can’t replace your father but

  I know you’ve been away but we’re a family and I want

  I know you’ve had a rough trot but I think it’s time you

  Will didn’t care how the sentences ended. It didn’t matter. Dad was dead. Mum seemed happy, Lena seemed okay. There was no point in him sticking around to disrupt the new family that had been formed in his absence.

  An absence which was, ironically, caused by his love of family, of his need to do what he could to help Dad. Not cure him, that was never on the table. By the time the stubborn dickhead went to the doctor he was riddled with tumours. No hope, just months of watching the bits of him that weren’t cancer shrivel. But Will knew there was something that would help with the grinding, gruelling nausea at least. Everyone knew it, if they were being honest, but Will was the only one with the guts to make it happen. Get the old man some medicine that actually worked. Let him sit up straight and eat dinner and watch telly. Let him be a human fucking being for a bit before he died.

  Had to be paid for, though, didn’t it? And Mum was barely making rent on her cleaner’s wage. Dad’s treatment was meant to be all Medicare but there were always extras. Will asked around, found the right people. Got himself dropped right into the supply chain. Dad’s needs met plus a little cash on top. Perfect solution.

  He could’ve stopped once Dad died. Should’ve. But he just … he didn’t, was all. Maybe if he’d realised turning eighteen meant he could now be in serious, adult shit. But it didn’t occur to him. It had felt for so long as though no one was paying attention to anything he did that he’d stopped being careful.

  Three days past his eighteenth birthday, one block down from the training college where he had almost completed his Early Childhood Education Cert III, he saw, over the shoulder of his buyer, a cop approaching. He had this weird feeling of oh, right, yeah, this. Not inevitability, like this was always going to happen; familiarity, like it had already happened. The words the police officer spoke to tell him he was under arrest? Never heard that set of words in that order before. His wrists had never felt the pinch of handcuffs, his neck and shoulder muscles never tensed in the specific way required of the cuffing position. New, too, the feeling of a firm but gentle hand on the top of his head, guiding and protecting at the same time, as he bent awkwardly to slide into the police car. All new and, on one level, surprising, fascinating even. But oh, right, yeah, this underscored it all.

  Only years later, when he heard a radio segment about inherited trauma, did it click into place for him. His grandpa had died in prison after more than a decade inside. His uncle Steve had done a few stretches, as had some great-uncles and great-great-uncles. The men of his line—his mother’s line, not that of his poor dad, although who knew really? Dad’d been out of touch with his family since he was a kid—these men had prison in their blood.

  Will had prison in his blood, and now he also had it in his memory and on his record, waiting to fuck him over. Stealing away dreams and jobs and relationships and sleep.

  His phone buzzed, Lena again.

  I could die in this hoard and it would be a close thing whether the neighbours noticed the smell of rot or you noticed I’d stopped texting you first

  He couldn’t hear her, didn’t know if she was being ironic or silly or genuine. Couldn’t think of a single thing to text back to let her know he was listening. Reading, whatever. Didn’t have the first fucking clue as to what was required of him right now.

  Dad would know. That thought, the drumbeat of his adult life. He knew there was a danger of romanticising the dead, knew he wouldn’t be the first bloke to mythologise his own dad into some kind of too-good-for-this-earth hero, but for real, he hadn’t ever met a man who was as good at life as his dad was. A man who could move confidently through a room, knowing when to hug, when to kiss a cheek, when to shake a hand or rest one firmly on a shoulder. A man you wanted at your party because he could make small talk and tell jokes and knew exactly what song to put on to kick things up a notch. Knew when a joke was a humanising gift rather than glib distraction. A man who stopped fights, never started them. Who women trusted to mind their kids and sometimes mind them when they were too pissed to mind themselves. Who his own kids loved so much they would have died of grief when they lost him if only he hadn’t made them promise not to. Whose kids respected him so much they’d never break a promise, even one so bloody bloody bloody hard to keep.

  The question Will never thought to ask him, but which he thought about all the time these days: how did he know to do all that, to be such a good man, when he didn’t have a dad himself to teach him? It was one of those questions Google couldn’t help you with. How come my fatherless dad was so good at being a man? How come I’m so bad at it?

  ‘Five minutes!’ the not-a-screw-but-could-be hollered through the door and that was helpful, because Will knew then that what was required of him was to pick his shorts off the floor and slide them onto his legs, find his t-shirt and pull it over his head. To shove his feet into his sneakers and tie them up. Wallet into one pocket, phone into the other, overstuffed backpack from floor to shoulders.

  Three minutes, tops, to clear himself out.

  A smoke haze sat over the pub dining room thanks to the wide-open, full-length windows. You could see ash particles moving through the sunbeams over the food station, mingling with steam as the barmaid from last night slopped baked beans into the bainmarie. ‘Beautiful one day, can’t fucking breathe the next,’ she said.

  ‘Geez, they work you hard here. Didn’t you only knock off five minutes ago?’

  ‘Feels like it, yeah.’ She cradled the empty pot like a pregnant belly, looked him up and down. ‘You’ve pulled up all right this morning.’

  Was she taking the piss or were her standards that low? He hadn’t showered or looked in a mirror for three days, had been drinking and popping codeine like a man with no family, no job, no hope. Which he was. If this was her idea of ‘all right’ then he worried for her, he really did.

  ‘Got any coffee?’ he asked.

  Her face closed down. She nodded towards the bar. ‘Usual place.’ One of the old-timers who lived out back was stationed next to the coffee urn. ‘Cobraball fire’s out of control, residents of Yepoon evacuated, six thousand hectares burnt in Livingstone Shire,’ he said, speaking to the mostly empty room rather than Will personally. He continued as Will carried his food and coffee over to a cleanish-looking table, reporting in the same flat tone on the status of a bunch of towns Will had never heard of. Only on the third mention of the out-of-control Cobraball fire did Will realise the bugger was reading the ticker-tape alerts from the silenced TV over the bar.

  Eating his soggy beans and dry scrambled eggs Will scrolled through Mercy’s Facebook page, clicked a link she shared about some meteorologists in the Arctic who had been trapped with a bunch of polar bears on a tiny ice island as the rest of the ground literally melted away around them. In the comments someone said, Why is this news? Glaciers have been melting at unimaginable rates for years, and Will muttered that it was probably the meteorologists trapped with the bears bit that made it newsworthy, but there was no Mercy to hear him and he shuddered because the blokes inside who muttered to themselves were lost causes. The kind of men you’d hear had drowned in their own spew or thrown themselves off a balcony within a week of being released, of being unwatched.

  The next comment said, ha ha no sympathy had it coming. The bears or the scientists? Us, maybe. We have it coming. It was what Mercy always said, that the human race was getting what it deserved. She said it with something close to excitement and it made Will queasy, this way of talking about climate catastrophe like it was justice. What about Haymish and Taylah? he’d asked her once. It was last summer, fifth day in a row over forty degrees. Do they deserve to live in a world where the temperature will stop them going outside for months at a time? She’d rolled her eyes at him. I’m taking about the human race being generally shit custodians of the planet. Don’t be so literal. When he asked if Haymish and Taylah weren’t part of the human race, she got properly shitty with him, told him he could cool it with worrying about her kids, thanks very much. Her KO move, reminding him they weren’t his to worry about.

  Back on Mercy’s Facebook page, one of her friends had written under the polar bear link: Babe, this article’s 3 years old FYI.

  And Mercy had written back, Oops! Bad news comes so fast it’s easy to miss things when they happen, hey?

  And he really, really wanted to write: WHY DO YOU SOUND SO FUCKING CHEERFUL ABOUT IT??? But that was the kind of comment a lost cause, aggressive ex-con, not stepfather material kind of person would make and so he didn’t.