‘I saw the skip out front. Looks pretty full,’ Ada said, as Lena closed the front door behind her.

  Will appeared from the living room, where he’d been helpfully napping since he returned from visiting Nic. ‘Yeah, probably should have ordered the biggest one. Hey, I’m Will. The nephew. Thanks heaps for coming today and for looking out for Aunty Nic so well. We really appreciate it.’

  For a second Lena was poleaxed with pain and love. It was still a shock, him being here. Over the past six years he’d been this calming, supportive presence who was never actually, you know, present. After his release he’d come to live with them in Brisbane and, although no one said it out loud, it was kind of awful. Prison had changed him, which sounds obvious, but it had been such a short time. Barely four months he was in and low security and all. Mum and the Dick had reassured her over and over that the kind of jail he went to was nothing like on TV. Will’s experience wouldn’t be much worse than a strict school camp. Three meals a day, exercise, recreation time. Just that he had to share space with randoms and he couldn’t leave when he wanted.

  But when he came back he was a different boy, man, whatever. He looked weirdly younger. Maybe all the time out of the sun, maybe his too-short hair, maybe the nervous stillness with which he held himself. Younger except around his eyes, which seemed permanently squinted, as though his face had frozen on its way to a cringe. After a month or so of trying to pretend everything was as it had always been, that the only thing different was the Dick lived with them instead of Dad and that here the sun tried to kill you for nine months of the year instead of three, Will took off to chase a job a mate had told him about further north.

  It was easier to be close again once he left. Once she didn’t have to look at his stiff neck and crinkled eyes. Text messages speeding back and forth across the state, exchanging jokes and complaints and secrets. Six years of that and now he was here, broader across the shoulders and more tanned than she’d ever seen him. Hair past his shoulders, beard growing in. Here in Nic’s hallway, talking to the social worker like he’s known her his whole life. This man so relaxed and confident that he made others feel relaxed and confident too. The broken brother who had gone away and turned into Dad.

  ‘You’ve obviously been working super hard here.’ Ada touched Will’s arm as she said it, smiled like she was really, truly proud of him.

  ‘Nah, not really. Lena’s done most of it,’ Will said, but with a one-shouldered shrug that communicated the opposite.

  ‘As you can see the hallway is completely clear,’ Lena said.

  Ada managed to drag her attention from Will, noted something on her clipboard, took a few photos with her phone. ‘How’s your aunt’s bedroom?’

  Lena led her past the closed spare-room door and into Nic’s room. She wished the social worker could’ve seen it last week, to appreciate the miracle Lena had performed in here. Three pieces of furniture—bed, bedside table, dressing table—each cleared of everything but the essentials. The bed made up with pink and white rose-covered sheets, a pastel pink quilt, two pillows in matching cases. It had taken the better part of an hour sorting through the mountains of linen to find matching pieces and then to shake out all the wrinkles and smooth them over the bed. Worth the effort though; it looked cosy and soft and clean. A perfect welcome home.

  The bedside table held a single touch-operated lamp (six more- or-less identical items were in the skip alongside five different kinds of desktop lamps). The dressing table top was completely clear, its four drawers emptied of a hundred things that nobody needed and then neatly refilled with: 1) moisturiser, lip balm, hairbrush and a scrunchie; 2) seven pairs of clean underwear; 3) seven pairs of clean socks; 4) two pairs of clean pyjamas.

  Apart from the closed, organised, built-in-wardrobe there was nothing—nothing—else in the room.

  Ada moved (easily! freely!) around taking pictures. ‘This is where Nicole fell, yes?’

  ‘Yeah. Off the dressing table. It had a lot of stuff on it then, though. And she fell on a whole heap of hard stuff, not the floor like this.’

  ‘You can see where she bled and that, just here.’ Will pointed out the area of carpet Lena had scrubbed and re-scrubbed until the stain was unnoticeable. Unless you really wanted it noticed and so pointed it out.

  ‘It’s been cleaned, though? The whole carpet, I mean.’

  ‘Yep,’ Lena said.

  ‘Not, like, by a cleaning company or anything, though,’ Will said. ‘Just leave-in shampoo and some good old elbow grease.’

  Lena wanted to slap him with her chafed and flaking hands, but Ada obviously liked him and wanted him to like her so he was, in one way at least, being useful.

  ‘It’s quite bare in here,’ Ada said.

  ‘Isn’t that the point? So there’s nothing for her to—’

  ‘Sure, sure. But did you read the literature I gave you?’

  Lena had not. She had, in fact, chucked it all in the bin before she left the hospital. It was a matter of pride, not to mention survival, that she brought nothing new into this house.

  ‘The thing is,’ Ada went on, talking mostly to Will anyway, ‘Nicole is likely to experience some distress when she comes home and finds all her things have been removed. I’m concerned for her welfare when she finds her space so bare.’

  ‘I don’t …’ Lena took a breath, staving off tears. ‘I thought the concern for her welfare was because the space was too full. Isn’t this—’ she waved an arm over the beautiful, clean, clear space ‘—isn’t this what you wanted?’

  Ada smiled kindly. ‘It’s not a matter of what I want, Lena. It’s about ensuring Nicole has a safe home to return to. We need to balance her physical safety with her emotional and psychological safety. For someone with hoarding disorder—’

  ‘Wait, is that an actual thing? Hoarding disorder?’ Will asked.

  Ada looked so disappointed she might as well have been Lena’s mother. ‘This was all in the literature I sent home with your sister.’

  ‘Nic herself says the only thing she cares about is getting back home. So can you just tell me, please, if the house passes and, if it doesn’t, exactly what I need to do to get it right?’

  Ada nodded. ‘Let’s take a look at the rest.’

  In the bathroom she turned all the taps on and off, flushed the toilet, tried to slide the bathmat under her feet before taking more photos. The kitchen caused some tense moments as Lena explained the fridge situation. When Ada asked about the (emptied and scrubbed clean) oven, Lena lied that there was a repairman coming tomorrow to check it was safe to use, which seemed to make the social worker inordinately happy. More photos then into the living room, which was ‘not ideal’ because of the cord running across the floor to the bar fridge, the blankets piled up on the lounge, the still over-full cabinet behind the TV and the crates (a quarter of what there had been!) under the windows and across the back wall.

  ‘Maybe for the best, though,’ Ada said. ‘Enough clutter to help Nicole feel secure but not enough to impact her safety.’

  ‘So we shouldn’t keep going in here?’ Lena asked. She had hoped to get rid of the rest of the crates at least before the skip got picked up in a few hours.

  ‘I wouldn’t. The more Nicole can feel that her home is unchanged, the easier the readjustment will be.’

  ‘It’s actually very, very changed, though,’ Lena pointed out.

  Ada looked sceptical. ‘Well, it’s not empty by any means, so …’ ‘So that’s good, yeah? Middle ground and all that.’ Will was like a goddamn puppy, bouncing up and down for approval.

  ‘Maybe. You do need to be prepared for—oh!’ Ada had reached for the door of the spare room before Lena could stop her. She froze, silent, hand still on the knob, door only half open, which was as far as it would go. Now you get what it’s been like, Lena wanted to say. Now you can see what I’ve been dealing with!

  ‘Yeah, we haven’t worried about that one,’ Will said, right at Ada’s shoulder. ‘Aunty Nic doesn’t use it day to day, so we figured it wasn’t a priority.’

  ‘As if you know what Aunty Nic does day to day,’ Lena muttered. Will had the gall to look hurt.

  The thing is, Lena would have liked to have cleared at least some of the floor of the spare room, but after only half an hour in there it had become obvious that this was the room in which Nic kept her most meaningful junk. Some of it not even junk, to be fair. Boxes of cards and letters. Photos, in envelopes and loose, in albums and frames. Clothes not all shoved in bags, but some folded carefully and placed in boxes alongside other mementoes. One box held a folded dress which Lena immediately recognised as the outfit Nic wore to Dad’s funeral. When Lena pulled it out to be sure—yes, it was distinctive, black jersey with embroidered daisies around the hem and collar—she saw beneath it the order of service and a brochure from the funeral home. There were other papers that Lena didn’t look at because she had spotted, peeking from underneath them all, a flash of yellow. She yanked it out, the bright cotton sundress she’d worn because it was Dad’s favourite. At the chapel, confronting the sea of black, she’d been shot through with shame. Worse, horror. Like a nightmare where you get on the bus naked. Mum was no good that day and Will was surrounded by mates, tall serious young men wearing borrowed suits and expensive sunglasses, so it was Nic who chased after her as she ran towards the car park. Nic who told her to wait in the car, ran back to the chapel, returned only minutes later with a men’s suit jacket and a black patent leather belt. She helped Lena belt the jacket in so it looked, at a glance, anyway, like a sophisticated suit-style mini-dress. Nic took off her own shoes and black pantyhose, urged Lena to put them on, wadded tissues in the shoes to help the fit, showed Lena how to tuck the waistband of the hose into the bottom of her bra to keep them from rolling down. Nic took Lena’s white sandals. The straps cut into the flesh on top of her feet but, she pointed out, they didn’t look so odd with her black dress since there were, after all, those white daisies tying it all together. And after, when everyone came back to the house, Lena had changed into her own black jeans and shirt and handed the yellow dress to Nic along with the items she had to return. I don’t want to see it ever again, she’d said.

  If Lena had kept going in the spare room there would have been other things she didn’t want to see, again or for the first time. She chose not to. Closed the door. Hoped it might stay closed forever.

  ‘Is that right, Lena?’ Ada asked. ‘This room isn’t in regular use?’

  ‘No. I mean, yes, that’s right, it isn’t.’

  Ada took some photos, closed the door. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Thanks for showing me around.’

  ‘Did we pass?’

  That kind smile again. Pity stabbed Lena in the throat. The shit this tiny, kind woman had to deal with every day.

  ‘I have to report back to my supervisor, who’ll have the final sign-off. But I don’t think it’ll be a problem. The level of clutter is non-critical.’

  ‘Woohoo!’ Will said. ‘High five!’

  Lena ignored his raised hand. Ada slapped it with a giggle and Lena instantly liked her more and trusted her judgement less.

  ‘Are you sure? Like, if you think your supervisor might say no is there anything we can do now to—’

  ‘You’ve done a great job, Lena. Both of you. Nicole’s lucky to have family like you. So many people in this situation have to rely on contract cleaners and they just …’ Ada swept her arm across the empty space. ‘Everything gone.’

  Sounds wonderful, Lena thought.

  ‘Poor buggers,’ Will said. ‘It must be awful to have no one.’

  After Ada had left, an hour before the skip was due to be picked up, Will said maybe they’d gone too far.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘With chucking stuff out. Like, maybe we got carried away and—’

  ‘Please, Will. Can you not?’

  ‘It’s just that Ada said—’

  ‘Don’t.’ Lena pushed past him to get inside Nic’s room. She closed the door, looked again at the results of her extraordinary week’s work.

  More anonymous and strictly utilitarian than her room at uni. Like some 1950s boarding house for unwed mothers, where the sparseness of the surroundings is both punishment for your sins and an attempt to make you too depressed to consider escape. All it needed was a wooden crucifix on the wall and a worn leather-bound Bible on the bedside table.

  Her phone had been silently vibrating in her pocket throughout Ada’s tour of the house. She pulled it out, glanced at the screen full of messages from Unknown Caller, from Annie, from Lou, from Mum. And from Nic. Nic saying DONT and PLEASE and I DIDNT AGREE. She threw the phone hard against the opposite wall. A sickening, expensive crack and then it lay face down on the carpet, shimmying a half-centimetre every time a new message arrived.

  In the rundown but blessedly un-junkyard like backyard, which was now accessible via the previously blocked kitchen door thanks to Lena’s going too far and getting carried away, she gathered a loose bouquet of flowers and greenery. Most of it probably weeds, technically, but it looked pretty. Bursts of yellow and orange and a spray of white. In the kitchen, she trimmed the stems, chose a tall tumbler from the sparkling clean cupboards she’d carefully stocked with the best of the hoarded crockery, and half filled it with water. She carried the arrangement into Nic’s room and placed it on the dressing table. Pulled out her goddamn cracked phone and texted Nic: Sorry, my phone broke! Everything is fine here tho. Spoke to that Ada chick and she said we’re good to bring you home tomorrow! Off to work now but can’t wait to see you tomoz xox

  WILL

  A couple of hours before they were due to collect Nic, Will googled hoarding disorder, cringing because he hadn’t thought to do it before. Why do I have to be the one to think of everything? Mercy said all the time, and he used to not know what she was on about until he did, and then that, too, became a thing she’d had to think of first.

  He’d only thought of it at all because his tooth had seared him awake while it was still dark and he had taken the last of the ibuprofen and was back on the sofa under the quilt, trying to distract himself from the barely diminished pain. He read the ‘Hoarding Disorder’ Wikipedia page and then one from a social services mob, tried to see Aunty Nic in any of it. But how would he? He hardly knew her anymore. Was she indecisive and anxious? Socially isolated? Did she have OCD? But here was something: a traumatic event. She’d had a couple of those, he knew. But who hadn’t? Still, could be a thing to consider.

  The toilet flushed, water ran on and off, a pool of yellow light cast out into the hallway.

  ‘Hey, Leen,’ he called. ‘When did Uncle Steve die?’

  ‘What are you on about?’ She was in the doorway, scowling, hand on hip like a cartoon of an angry mother.

  ‘Just wondering what might have triggered all this.’

  ‘Steve died when I was a baby.’

  It annoyed him, her dropping of the Uncle, the Aunty. Like she thought she was on par with them, grown. ‘Do you reckon that might—’

  ‘Obviously not. We practically lived here as kids, long after he died. She was fine.’

  ‘Yeah. But it’s weird Mum and Aunty Nic never spoke about him. Maybe there’s something—’ But she had stomped away already.

  It wasn’t that Uncle Steve was a secret. Will had always known his mum had a half-brother who was much older and who had died young. But the tidbits of info mum dropped about him when pushed made things less rather than more clear. What was he like? Will asked once, and Mum said, He always brought me and your aunty a bag of mixed lollies from the corner shop and a box of Roses for our mum. When he asked what Steve did for a job, Mum said he worked in a tool shop, but another time she said he worked in a factory and another time that he was a cleaner, and when Will wanted to know why he had so many jobs she said, Not everyone works in the same place their whole life, which didn’t answer the question but did seem like a dig at Aunty Nic, who had worked at the same place since she was a teenager.

  It wasn’t until the morning after fourteen-year-old Will came home from a mate’s place with a vicious case of the giggles and bloodshot eyes that Mum sat him and Lena down and told them their uncle had died from a drug overdose. She didn’t say which drug, or that his death came after a decade of addiction, including short stints in jail and rehab—these details were filled in later. At the time, she made it sound as though Steve, like Will, had smoked weed one night with a mate and that was the end of him.

  Later, after Will’s arrest, Aunty Nic had asked him if he was an addict, if that was why he’d been dealing. He told her truthfully that he didn’t even use, and she’d sucked in all her breath and let it out again and started talking about something else altogether. Some dumbarse reality TV show. Even at the time he’d known that was fucking weird. Her nephew facing serious drug charges and she’s rabbiting on about some bloody cooking comp. When he mentioned the weirdness to Mum she’d said, My sister is not good at handling hard things, and then hugged him for the thousandth time that night.

  Mum wasn’t that great at hard things either. Never talked about her brother, never talked about her dad, but at least when Will and Lena’s dad died she let them ask as many questions as they needed, always did her best to answer, even though it was obvious how hard it was for her to speak without crying. But, then, his death was innocent. His life, too, as far as Will knew. Too short to have done much damage.

  Aunty Nic had scripts to be filled so Will ducked into the hospital pharmacy while Lena helped her out to the street to wait for the Uber. He asked the pharmacist if she could fill the repeats as well but she barely bothered to say no, just repeated the doctor’s instructions for Nic’s medication regime. He thanked her, bought some more piss-weak painkillers for himself (all on Aunty Nic’s Mastercard, which Lena had handed over like it was her own), took a double dose right there in the useless fucking emporium of public health.