The doctor looked pointedly at the stuffed backpack at Will’s feet. Will was immediately aware of his faded board shorts, threadbare t-shirt, greasy ponytail and five days of stubble. Knew the shadows under his eyes must show the nights of disturbed and shallow sleep. He felt tears coming, sucked in a few fast breaths to clear them away.

  ‘I will be staying with family. On my way there now. After this. Just arrived this morning from Queensland. Long trip, you know. Overnight as it happened, because of flight delays and, um, travelling’s tiring, yeah, but I’m on my way to my, um, aunty’s place now. She’s in Leichhardt and I didn’t know if there’s, like, ah, a bulk-billing place there anymore, so I thought I better, you know, while I’m in the city still, find somewhere to get some, um—’ Stop it! Deep breath. ‘To get this sorted.’ He cupped his cheek again.

  ‘Let’s see then.’ The doctor snapped on a pair of gloves, rolled forward, shone a torch inside Will’s gaping mouth, prodded at the pain with surprisingly gentle fingers, rolled away, discarded his gloves, began typing.

  ‘Any allergies?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘There’s some indication of infection. I’m prescribing you an antibiotic to help with that. If the pain continues, though, you will need to see a dentist to sort out the underlying cause.’

  ‘Right, thanks.’ Don’t ask for pain meds. Don’t ask for pain meds.

  The doctor handed him the prescription. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘No, um, yeah, it’s just the pain is—’

  ‘I understand you have some pain. The problem, Will, is that you’ve never attended this practice before. Your home address is in another state. I don’t know your medical history, have no way of knowing how many prescriptions you’ve already collected or how much codeine or whatever else you may have hoarded. And in any case, the level of inflammation does not lead me to think prescription pain relief is necessary. Over-the-counter should be sufficient to tough it out.’

  Fucking hot face, fucking goddamn prickle of tears. He couldn’t speak and didn’t know what he’d say if he could. He nodded, left the doctor’s office with the prescription in one hand and the scrunched-up cup in the other.

  At the pharmacy counter he swallowed his last trickle of pride and asked how much the prescription would cost. Twelve bucks. There was fifteen, maybe, left in his account and he still needed to get to Leichhardt. If he skipped the antibiotics he could buy three packs of off-brand ibuprofen for nine dollars and then he’d definitely have enough left for the bus fare. Probably.

  ‘Mr Harris?’ The pharmacist was tapping the counter. He was aware of the line forming behind him.

  He nodded, let the woman take the script away to prepare. There’d be painkillers of some sort at Aunty Nic’s. Maybe even some good stuff. Could be Aunty Nic had a hoard of the kind the prick of a doctor was referring to. A whole pile of opioids or narcotics ready to tumble out of some high, forgotten cupboard Lena hadn’t cleared out yet.

  Boarding the bus at Railway Square his adrenaline surged. When he asked the driver the fare to Norton Street, the man rolled his eyes, pointed at a machine further down the aisle. Told him to tap. Again, there was a line forming behind him and he felt the collective impatience at his taking a whole goddamn five seconds to ask a question needling his spine.

  There was a time he wouldn’t have thought twice about boarding a bus without the fare. On the rare occasions an inspector boarded you’d duck, get off at the next stop, no worries. Different once you were a grown man, couldn’t easily slither through the packed aisle, jump over shopping bags and dodge prams, slip out the back door before the inspector made his way to you. Different when you had a record, and no idea which of the tiny infractions so-called civilised society might accuse you of would be overlooked, which a cause to drag you back to court.

  Anyway, he tapped his debit card on the machine like he saw others doing and it chirped in the same way it had for the people in front of him which probably meant he was okay.

  While he’d been waiting at the medical centre he’d worked out that keeping his mouth slightly open helped. He felt like a creep sitting there gaping, but figured it was better than poking himself in the gums every few minutes. Probably. The view out the window onto Parramatta Road might have made him gape anyway. He’d been away less than seven years but everything had changed. Empty shopfronts and graffiti-covered building sites where there used to be bridal shops and bakeries, towers of apartments where there used to be delis and 1940s terraces. A low-rise unit block they’d lived in for a few years when he was at primary school was now a pole dancing studio, the building they moved to after that was gone altogether, a block of dirt and rubble protected by a chain-wire fence and signs warning trespassers there were attack dogs on site.

  On Norton Street, the Coles where he and his mates stole Mars Bars and batteries and condoms was still there, but on either side nail salons and massage shops had replaced the Italian cafes and delis. The primary school looked the same as it had when they’d jump the fence at night to lie on the grass, which was softer and cleaner than the grass anywhere else in the suburb. Looked the same but there’d be an alarm system now, for sure, maybe security guards. Boys like they’d been would have to find somewhere else to watch the stars and smoke and talk shit. Were there still boys like that here? It seemed unlikely what with all the Pilates studios and artisan bread shops.

  Walking from the bus stop through the back streets of the suburb was like walking back in time, though (except for the top-of-the-range cars parked in front of every second driveway, Stop WestConnex signs on every third lawn, construction racket from every fourth or fifth house). But lilly pilly hedges and redbrick walls still outnumbered security fences, and jacarandas and silky wisteria still dripped onto the footpaths. Still the waft of garlic and roasting tomatoes, the roar of planes overhead. Houses he’d been inside once or twice or dozens of times, yards where he’d smoked his first cigarette, drunk his first bourbon, had his first—first ten or twenty, probably—kisses.

  In one street, he passed two houses of now-dead school mates and the turn-off for the street of another. One car crash, one accidental OD and one on purpose. All in this neighbourhood, all before they were sixteen or seventeen. Thanks to the shit show of prison followed by years at a FIFO site that attracted the desperate and reckless he knew other dead young men, too many to say off the top of his head. He’d have to actually run through their names and count, and he wouldn’t be doing that, thanks very much.

  But these three he knew without thinking, without remembering. They were there same as Dad, too much alive in this place to ever not be here. Macca, jug ears and a stinking mutt of a dog always at his heels (though not in the car when it melded finally with the telegraph pole). Stokes, short but with a Hollywood smile that made every girl ready to kick off her undies and every bloke keen to smash his teeth into his throat. No one did, though, because he was always up to his not-real-high neck in both pussy and pills, and happy to pass on his extras to the other fellas. Forgot he had to take the children’s dose, they all joked at his funeral. Sam had been laughing the loudest. Held a deflating beach ball he’d found melting into the ground somewhere, said, Hey, look, I’m Stokes with an eccy.

  Sam downed his entire prescription three weeks later. What the prescription was Will didn’t know. People just said it like that—took the lot, whole prescription—as though you were meant to know.

  Prescription. Fuck. He stopped in the middle of the footpath, slapped his loose short pockets as if the packet could have somehow made its way in there without him knowing, unzipped the backpack and ferreted around with both hands even though he knew he had not opened the damn thing since the airport. When had he last held the pharmacy bag? Boarding the bus it had been in his right hand. He’d balanced it on top of the backpack while he fumbled his debit card out of his wallet with the whole hostile line bristling behind him. Balanced it there and then tapped his card and, still holding the card and his wallet in one hand and the backpack with the other, clomped down the aisle to an empty seat. He’d dropped the backpack while he put the card in the wallet and the wallet in his pocket, and then?

  Someone would find it later today, he guessed, skidding out from under the seats as the bus took a corner. Check if there was anything good inside before chucking it in the bin or dropping it back on the floor, stomping it flat for the hell of it.

  At the corner of Aunty Nic’s street it occurred to him that spending twenty-four hours travelling while grieving several relationships, panicking about the future and nursing a terrible toothache was pretty dumb. Doing all that in order to revisit the city where he watched his dad die and where his last known address was a state prison was completely fucking stupid.

  But then there was the reason he came. Lena. Seeing her would slow his plummet, maybe even reverse its course. For all the shit memories he had of Sydney, he also had plenty of good ones, and most of them featured his sister. Not her alone; the four of them. As a family they were the kind of happy you didn’t realise was rare until it ended and you got a taste of what life was like for most people, most of the time. They were an ordinary, squabbling over the TV, struggling to pay the bills, annoying the shit out of each other at the dinner table, really, really, really fucking happy family. They loved each other and a lot of the time liked each other as well. It was a miracle unnoted until it was over.

  He could never get that back, obviously. But maybe something new and almost as good, now he and Lena were free, independent adults. No Mum hovering anxiously, no Rick the Dick forcing himself into their space, pretending to get their decades-old family jokes. Just the two of them against the world. It could be great. A fresh start. Exactly what he needed.

  LENA

  Salvation arrived at 8 a.m. in the form of a bright yellow skip bin taking up three car spaces on the road outside the house. Within an hour of signing the delivery docket Lena had cleared the house of eighteen bursting-at-the-seams bags. Drop in a garbage ocean, but a boost all the same to see the speed with which it was possible to get rid of stuff once there was somewhere to chuck it.

  She had just hauled the second non-functioning vacuum cleaner of the day into the skip when the road moved beneath her feet and black spots appeared on the yellow steel. She closed her eyes, eased forward until she could press her head and palms against the skip, and waited for everything to stop moving.

  She breathed in metallic tang, breathed out the sickly sweet fruitiness of ketosis. Lou had taught her to recognise the smell, celebrate its achievement. It meant her body was cannibalising itself, using its fat stores to survive. Problem was that she needed to do more than survive today. She needed to complete another ten hours or so of hard labour. Also, she didn’t have much in the way of fat stores left after nine months of eating lunch like Annie (miso soup, sashimi, garden salad without dressing) and skipping dinner because who can afford it when you’ve spent fifteen dollars on a frigging tasteless lunch salad? Eating like a rich girl while still being a poor one had not only helped her become as thin and wan as a model, it had taught her a lesson that extended into every aspect of life: If you get used to wanting less, you’ll always have enough.

  She’d forgotten this briefly, gone ahead and let herself have what she wanted without restraint or caution. If she’d known the voice in her head urging her on belonged to a woman so greedy she would almost die under the weight of her belongings, she may have resisted. May not have ended up in an exponentially replicating video, the epitome of a shameless whore who just can’t get enough.

  When the world felt stable again, Lena returned to the house and scoffed a stale protein bar from the bottom of her backpack. Her ungrateful stomach grumbled and cramped while she started work emptying the bath. Could start her own shitty supermarket, right here. Come get your out-of-date, slimy-labelled, store-brand shampoo and conditioner, your leaking, sticky tubs of hair gel. Buy three jars of palm-oil-and-paraben-laden face cream and get a jumbo bottle of environmentally disastrous micro-beaded body wash for free.

  She stopped to piss, wondering whether ‘organic and all-natural avocado body butter’ was edible, saw that her undies were splattered with blood. She hadn’t had her period for months—another benefit of the skinny rich girl diet—but of course it had to come now.

  You win, body, you win. I’ll leave this house stocked with everything except what I need to go spend money I don’t have on things I don’t want. Fucking perfect.

  As she stepped out on to the porch, a man pushing a stroller with one hand and gripping a leash attached to the torso of a rapidly toddling child with the other glanced at Lena, then focused. His eyes said, Don’t I know you? Or maybe it was: What are you doing there? He slowed, calling for the child to stop, tugging on the leash as he moved towards Lena. His smile said, ugly bitches are the best at riding dick theyre so grateful.

  She fumbled with the door, which had closed and locked behind her. It took her too many seconds to remember that the key was in her pocket, and by the time she had it in the lock the man was calling to her. Not loud, close.

  ‘Hey! Hi! Something happened to Nic?’

  Lena turned, took him in. Smooth baby face but with grey streaking through his thick black hair. One arm pulled behind his back by the straining toddler.

  ‘I’m Andre. I live across the street. Up a bit and across.’ He jerked his head to the left. ‘Haven’t seen Nic for a bit. Wife and I were just saying, hope nothin’s happened to her?’

  ‘Oh. No. Actually, yes, sort of. She had a bad fall last week. I’m Lena. Her niece. I’m just—’

  ‘Lena! The brains of the family. We know all about you and your high distinctions and everything. A fall, hey? That’s no good. You’re here to take care of her?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, she’s in the hospital at the moment. Probably for a bit longer.’

  ‘Geez. Poor thing. We wondered because, well, she sometimes watches the rug rats for us. I texted her the other day but she never—I feel awful now. Shoulda come and checked up in person.’ ‘She babysits for you? Here?’ Lena could imagine the straining toddler climbing one of those living room stacks, falling hard on her soft little head. And the baby? Would it even be able to breathe in that thick, dusty air?

  ‘At ours. The little one sleeps through and this one—ha, not that you’d know from her current feral state, but she crashes out early and stays out mostly. So it’s not, like, a lot of work for your aunty. We’re not taking advantage or anything. I trim the hedges, sweep up the leaves and that for her.’ He spread his free arm out, taking in the non-expansive expanse of it.

  ‘I was just thinking how neat it was out here.’

  He smiled, bit of pride there. ‘Nice having neighbours you can rely on, help each other out. Not many in this street, sorry to say. Nic’s one of the good ones, but. So you just here to get some things for her or—’

  ‘Daddy! Stop talking! Come on come on come on come on!’

  Andre laughed, waved a hand at his little girl.

  ‘I’m staying for a bit,’ Lena said. ‘Getting the place, ah, cleaned up for when she comes back. She’ll need a bit more room to get around.’

  ‘Good on you. She’s that proud of you, hey. Must be stoked you’re doing all this for her.’

  ‘Daddy! I need you now! Come on come on come on come oooooooon.’

  Andre grinned, turning towards the stroller in the driveway and the straining child. ‘Better get this one to the play centre before she screams the neighbourhood down. But hey, let us know if you need a hand with anything. I work nights, so anything during the day. And after five my wife Mel’s home. She loves Nic, so, yeah. Number forty-eight. All right, chicken, I’m coming. See ya, Lena.’

  The supermarket aisles reverberated with a child’s full-throated screams. Lena scanned the shelf labels beneath the tampons. The yellow-stickered ones, super-sized and with applicators, were almost half the price of her preferred slim regulars. The difference would buy a tub of cottage cheese and a tin of tuna. Maybe a bag of salad, too, if the cottage cheese was on special like last week.

  Probably there had been tampons in the piles of stuff she’d thrown out from the kitchen the other day. There had been so many overstuffed plastic bags in the cupboards and under the table that she’d stopped opening them. What was the point when nine out of ten items went right into a different plastic bag ready to be tossed?

  This, right now was the point. The blood stiffening her undies while she calculated the unit price of discount tampons.

  Probably some of the bags she’d tossed from Nic’s room had brand-new undies in her size, too. There had been a lot of clothing, tags still attached.

  From behind her came a tut-tut, which she didn’t know was even a real thing that people did. She spun, ready to unload on the cow tutting her slow tampon contemplation, but the cow—actually a tiny, grey-faced woman with Amy Winehouse hair—was shooting daggers at the screaming, thrashing child who’d just been wheeled into the aisle by a serene-faced woman in a West Tigers jersey.

  ‘A good slap’d sort that out,’ the cow said as the trolley rolled past. If the Tigers fan heard, she didn’t show it, continuing up the aisle and stopping in front of the painkillers. Then, as though her hearing worked on delay, her head snapped towards Lena and she blinked, looked back at the pills, peeked to the side as though she wasn’t.

  I didn’t say it, Lena wanted to tell her. Instead she knocked the cheap, giant tampons into her basket and took off for the tinned food aisle.

  At the checkout, the toddler was doing its best to maintain the rage one aisle over. It was like those old battery ads with the drumming bunny; the kid kept kicking the sides of the trolley and shaking its fist, howling incomprehensibly at the floor, but ever slower, ever quieter. Winding down down down.

  Lena felt the mother’s eyes on her. She glanced over … Yep, still staring. Fuck. Did the woman think the slapping comment had come from her or … Fuck fuck fuck. Even here? Even fucking everywhere. That’s the point of the internet, hey.