One afternoon in his in-box he sees her name: taramarie. The Nazi who collects footy tips every Friday afternoon tells him he has thirty seconds to hand them in, but he hasn’t even started on them yet. His eyes are fixed on the screen, his heart is hammering, and finally, with shaking fingers, he presses the in-box and sees words typed in the most ridiculous font.

Can you tell Frankie and Justine that I’ve run out of credit on my phone and to check their e-mails instead?

Tara

What. A. Bitch.

“It’s only four thirty,” Stani says to him one day when he walks into the kitchen and puts on his apron and begins pulling the glasses out of the washer.

He shrugs. Francesca’s in the back room practicing and Justine’s doing an essay at one of the tables in the main bar, so it’s not as if he’s the only one who has nowhere else to go.

Ned walks in as well, his face reddening instantly when he sees Stani. Ned is intimidated by anyone who speaks or looks at him, except for Francesca and Justine. And Tom. There’s nothing about Tom that intimidates Ned.

“You’re early,” Stani barks.

Ned nods in agreement and then goes to the freezer to get the meat out.

Whether Ned wants him to or not, Tom begins chopping up the salad items just to keep himself occupied. Francesca’s voice travels to where they’re working silently.

“Catch the news

One more day

Big wide world

Swallowed whole

Rhythm breaks me

Out of step

Need to shake this

’Less I break

’Cause nothing counts when you’re not here

Too much sadness, too much fear”

Ned stops seasoning the meat and closes his eyes for a moment, before walking to the door.

“’Cause nothing counts unless you’re here. / Shake these shackles, I might tear,” he calls out to her before returning to the sink bench.

“I have an aversion to rhyme,” he explains, as if Tom’s asked.

Francesca’s practicing on the banjo today. Tom likes how it sounds.

“She watched Shut Up and Sing and thinks she’s one of the Dixie Chicks.”

Ned’s on a roll. He does that sometimes. Explains stuff out of the blue. It’s usually about the girls, and, inspired by Mohsin the Ignorer, Tom pretends he’s not interested.

She begins singing again:

“Speak the words

Make no sense

No part working

I’m on hold

Need those hands

Make me whole

Hunger breaks me

I can’t breathe

’Cause nothing counts unless you’re here

Shake these shackles, I might tear.”

Ned grunts with satisfaction. Tom stops chopping and thinks for a moment before walking to the door.

“’Cause nothing counts unless you’re here. / Shackles bind me, I walk free,” he calls out.

He walks back to the sink. Ned stares at him questioningly, shaking his head. “Doesn’t make sense.”

“When he’s home, she’s unbound from the shackles constructed by her loneliness and so she walks free,” Tom explains before going back to the chopping.

“Whereas I think that if she doesn’t shake the shackles, she is so fragmented and fragile that she’s like a piece of . . .”

“Tissue paper?” Tom suggests.

Ned nods. “That can tear.”

She tries it again with Tom’s chorus.

“I think they’ve had a mini argument long distance,” Ned explains. “She’s okay with tattoos in ode to her, but apparently he got pissed with the engineers while they had a day’s leave and piercing took place. One to the eyebrow and the other . . . she won’t say.”

Tom looks at him with disbelief. “Will Trombal? Piercing? In places she won’t say?”

Justine walks in and has an anxious little chatter with Ned the Cook in the corner. When Tom walks toward them to empty the scraps from the cutting board, they stop speaking for a moment.

“It’s not as if I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mutters.

“We’re not talking about you, if that’s what you think, Thomas,” Justine says patiently.

He goes back to his chopping but doesn’t let it go. “I’ll make you a two-trillion-dollar bet I know what it’s about.”

She stands with her arms folded, waiting. Tom and Justine always used to make bets in the trillions and billions, mostly about music trivia and chords, and Justine could never resist taking up the challenge. There’s a hint of a smile on her face.

“Go on,” she says.

“You’re probably in love with some musician at the Con. And we all know how that’s panned out in the past. One whole year of having a secret crush you’ve told no one about and now you’ve entered the second year, where you talk about him and do nothing about it. Next year you’ll be analyzing the way he says, ‘Hi, Justine.’ Hopefully by the Beijing Olympics — no, the Olympics they’ll one day have in Afghanistan — you’ll have exchanged mobile numbers.”

She stares at him drolly and then gives Ned the same look.

Francesca walks in at two minutes to five, ready for her shift. And the news. “Why’s everyone standing around?” she asks, fiddling with the radio.

“Because Thomas is a smart-arse,” Justine says. “He reckons I’m not going to get Ben the Violinist’s phone number until Afghanistan has the Olympics.”

He’s ready for the onslaught. Daring to hurt the feelings of one of the sisterhood was punishable by a death stare. Tara Finke’s was the deadliest, but Francesca’s was the closest by seconds.

“What timeline did I give it?” Francesca asks.

“2025,” Ned informs her. “You said she would probably be taking Ben the Violinist on their first date to your fortieth birthday.”

“Mock me all you like, but this guy’s not shy. He’s just not into me,” Justine says. “He doesn’t even know I exist.”

“His name’s Ben,” Francesca says to Tom, as if he’s asked. “And he’s twenty-one and he’s a violinist and he’s from the Riverina and he has a very, very dry sense of humor and he lives in Waterloo with a bunch of mates, and when he plays the violin, he keeps his eyes closed and this one time he opened them and the first thing he did was catch Justine’s eye. And then he winked. So now she says it’s their song.”

Tom makes a sound as if he’s sobbing and he covers his heart with his hand.

“And she just has to build up her courage and let him know how she feels,” Francesca says.

It’s always been the same with Justine. She was the most comfortable in her own skin of all of them, and since they left school, she was the one with the biggest social life outside their group, totally at ease with guys. Unless she’s madly in love with them.

Stani pokes his head in. “Are we on strike?”

Justine follows him out, and Tom walks over to the radio and turns it off in the middle of the second news story, which is about some freight train crashing into a passenger train in California. Francesca switches it back on, staring at him with irritation until he switches it back off again.

“It’s nowhere close to where your people are,” he tells her quietly. “Seeing you’ve got the original out of the way, what will the cover song for the Blessed Pierced One be?” he adds.

Francesca looks at him suspiciously and then back to Ned, who looks sheepish and gets back to work.

“How do you know I wrote it for him? It could be for any of them.”

“Need those hands. Make me whole.”

She makes a face as if she’s thinking. “That’s my mum.”

“My mistake.”

“Hunger breaks me. I can’t breathe. That’s Will’s line,” she says.