“All right,” said Ellen. Her stomach knotted, and she found that she actually didn’t want him to speak about it. Words would just tangle things up further and make them feel worse. How strange. She had always thought words were the answer to everything; after all, she treated people with nothing but words.

Keep those lines of communication open! That’s what she always told her clients experiencing relationship difficulties. And now she couldn’t think of anything worse than talking. This must be what it was like to be a man, his heart sinking each time a woman said, “We need to talk,” thinking, Just shut up, woman! as she revealed her soul in all its naked glory when he really wanted her to keep it covered up.

“The thing is—” began Patrick.

Ellen said, “Is that your mother?”

She could just make out the figure of Maureen picking her way carefully across the sand as if watching out for land mines.

“Phone call for Ellen!” Her voice, surprisingly clear, floated down the beach. “She says it’s urgent!”

Chapter 25

Friendship is the only cure for hatred,

the only guarantee of peace.

—Buddhist quote on Ellen O’Farrell’s notice board

In the end, Tammy left at the same time as Lance and Kate. She’d invited herself along to the movies with them. It was clear that they were all three going to become friends. I’d forgotten how Tammy had that childlike ability to make instant friends. She’d done the same to me years ago.

A nurse came in to see me, just as they were all standing up to go. When she opened the door, everyone was laughing at something Kate had just said, and the nurse apologized and said, “I’ll come back when your friends are gone.”

She thought I was a normal person with normal friends who were fond of me, who had rushed straight to my bedside when they’d heard I had an accident. She didn’t know that Lance was someone I worked with but had never seen socially, who, to be honest, I’d never really even noticed as a person, and that his wife was a complete stranger to me, and their visiting me was really sort of odd, and that Tammy was someone I’d lost touch with for three years, and that none of the people there knew the truth about how I’d broken my pelvis.

The really strange thing was that Lance, Kate and Tammy seemed determined to continue this performance. They all had plans to visit me again. Helping me through my six weeks of forced bed rest had become a project for them. I wondered, had they all signed up for some sort of self-improvement movement doing the rounds on the Internet—random philanthropic acts?

Lance was going to bring me a portable DVD player so I could finally watch The Wire series. “You’ve got no excuse now,” he’d said, with a gentle, teasing note in his voice that made me think he possibly, bizarrely, liked me.

Also, Kate was coming back to teach me how to knit, of all things. This had come about because Tammy had said that I should use this time to do something I’d always wanted to do but never had the time for—like learning Spanish or whatever. I said that I’d always wanted to know how to knit, which was sort of half true. It was something that I’d always said I wanted to do anyway, without really ever having the intention of doing anything about it. But as soon as I said it, Kate’s eyes lit up with the same evangelical glint that Lance got when he talked about The Wire, and she was now all set to give me knitting lessons.

And it had somehow transpired that Tammy was going to live in my townhouse while I was in the hospital. Since she’d come back to Sydney, she’d been staying with her sister, who was driving her crazy, and so offering her my place had seemed the obvious thing to do. She was going to pick up clothes for me and bring them back after I had the operation on my ankle the next day.

I wondered what she’d think of my home. No books or pictures or photos on the fridge. If I’d known she was coming, I would have styled it in preparation. The bottle of wine I’d been drinking and the packet of painkillers would still be sitting on the kitchen table. Apart from that, every surface was bare and extremely, weirdly clean. The fridge and pantry were filled with functional food: milk, bread, butter. No biscuits or cakes, no treats at all. She would notice how I’d changed, remark on it. She used to visit me when I was living with Patrick and tease me about my domesticity: the cut flowers arranged in vases, freshly baked biscuits always ready in the tin. Now my home looked like it belonged to an obsessive-compulsive loner, a serial killer.

After I’d eaten my dinner—it was described on the docket placed on the tray as a “light” meal, but it was actually the most substantial meal I’d had in months; I normally ate a bowl of cereal for dinner—I put my head back against the pillow and listened to the industrious sounds of the hospital: quick footsteps down hallways, the clunk of trolleys, voices rising and falling.

Most people would have felt lonely, suddenly alone in a hospital room, but I didn’t. I found the noises strangely comforting. This was my village. The village for sick, sad, broken people like me.

The pain began to roll in again, and like a well-trained rat, I automatically clicked for more morphine.

I wondered, as I habitually did, what Patrick and Ellen and Jack were doing right at that moment, whether Jack’s arm was giving him a lot of pain, whether Patrick had been to the police about me. But the morphine made me lazy. My wondering was idle. I had no desire to actually be there, watching them.

And then my mind drifted away from them, to Kate, Lance and Tammy, and whether they’d enjoyed the movie, and if they’d gone out to that Korean restaurant they’d talked about, and I imagined Lance and Tammy doing their Baltimore drug dealer impressions while Kate rolled her eyes.