They say a snail can stay in its shell for three years. It just crisps up its opening and hibernates, and then the rain comes, and the snail slowly loosens its foot, or whatever it is that’s stoppering the hole, and out it comes. Well, that was Meg. The rain began to wet her toes and, slowly, out she came.

It was only a week after my birthday, so it shouldn’t have been that wet, but it was. The whole month’s rain fell in two days. Clouds were bundled up in the sky and everywhere was silky grey and slippery.

Meg and I were standing in the lobby waiting for Mr Breadsell to finish serving and come across to open up the curtain, but we weren’t in any hurry. The movie wasn’t going to start without him. It was a monster thriller we’d seen previewed a few weeks before and I was jogging Meg’s memory of that when I recognised the Englishwoman, standing over at the ticket counter, checking her watch and glaring at Mr Breadsell, who was busy shovelling popcorn.

She was shorter than anyone else in the lobby, with that stocky sort of stance that shorter people sometimes have, as if they think everyone around them’s set on knocking them over. She wore a heavy brown coat, thick tan tights and the same ginger shoes I’d seen wrapped up in plastic outside her front door. I’d only knocked on it once and I wouldn’t be going again. She hadn’t been friendly. She’d crossed her arms deliberately once she’d opened the door and barely glanced at the invitation I’d handed her.

‘I’m sure you’ve heard my husband isn’t in the best of health,’ she’d said.

Who would I have heard that from?

‘I thought you lived alone,’ I’d told her, and she snorted.

‘Did you now?’

I did. I had. But then I only wanted to turn around and walk away.

‘Well anyway,’ I said, ‘you’re both welcome to come. Meg will be there too.’ I’d thought she might have been encouraged by the promise of a familiar face, but she only screwed up her own and said, ‘Meg?’

Everyone knew who Meg was. ‘The woman in the caravan.’

She shook her head then, with a face that said I might as well be talking Klingon, but she must have known. I’d seen her take her taxi. I didn’t know where it took her, but it picked her up from close enough to Meg’s place that she couldn’t have not seen it.

So, I didn’t really like her. You don’t have to tell everyone your business, but unless they’re asking for something you don’t want to give them, I don’t think there’s any need to lie.

I’d have been surprised if she’d come to my birthday party, but I was even more surprised to see her at the Galaxy, on the rainiest day we’d had for months, waiting to watch a movie about a werewolf.

I nudged Meg, and we watched the Englishwoman check her change and push her purse deep down into her bag before she left the counter.

She reminded me a lot of my dead Nanna Cole, though there wasn’t so much of the Englishwoman. More walk and work than Nanna’d ever done, less sitting around and eating pies and chocolate, but they had the same hair, home-rinsed a frosty lilac and set in prickly curlers. Nanna Cole didn’t believe in make-up, where the Englishwoman’s nose was powdered and her lips waxed peachy pink, though only in the middle, as if she’d pursed them to apply her lipstick. Her eyebrows were sketched in high surprise.

I could have guessed that she’d pretend she hadn’t seen us. It was in line with her pretending not to have seen the sprawl of Meg’s home when she must have walked past it a hundred times. She busied herself with the clip on her handbag as she came across and stood right in front of us (which was a bit rude, because there was a loose sort of line). She put her back towards us to begin with, but then she turned around, avoiding our faces to look behind us, up and over our heads, as if she’d let go of a balloon.

I had to say hello. It would have been too weird if I hadn’t. Even Meg had to trap a giggle.

She looked at us right away then with pretend surprise. ‘Oh!’ she cried, and predictably: ‘Fancy seeing you here.’ (For God’s sake!)

I introduced Meg, but they’d met before. I could tell by the look on Meg’s face, when the Englishwoman took her hand in a limp one of her own. It was somewhere between surprise and amusement.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ the Englishwoman said. ‘You can call me Lily.’ As if it wasn’t her name.

‘I’ve never seen you here before,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m surprised we haven’t bumped into each other!’

I wasn’t. If she’d ever been before it wasn’t on a Tuesday morning, but what’s the point in challenging a lie? What would you ever learn that you didn’t know already?

‘Is it one you’ve been waiting for?’ I nodded towards the curtain, which Mr Breadsell was about to pull aside.

‘It is,’ Lily said, but the dart of her eyes made me wonder if she knew what it was she’d just bought a ticket to see.

We filed into the theatre behind her, and it would have seemed rude if we hadn’t followed her into the row she chose and taken seats beside her. I didn’t mind, but I think Meg did a bit. She kept her bag on her lap instead of tucking it down between her feet, and her neck seemed shorter somehow. I sat between the two of them, and it was a relief that Lily didn’t talk, and a bonus that she shared a packet of biscuits she pulled out of her pocket once the lights went down.

I studied her as best I could through the adverts, without turning my head. Her earrings were fancier than I would have pegged her for: a cluster of canary-yellow stones and crystals wired together like braces and screwed onto, not through, the wattles of her lobes. Three gold chains were sticky in the creases of her neck. A gold ring, a cross and a curly name too small for me to read without leaning in and giving myself away.

Lily did not enjoy the movie. She bit her lip and swore under her breath at every jump, and towards the climax she avoided scares by tidying her handbag quietly. I snuck a look inside it and was surprised to see a pack of Longbeach Menthol. She didn’t have the smell of a smoker.

When Mr Breadsell asked her how she’d liked the movie, as we all filed out, she told him it was ‘different’.

‘It’s certainly that!’ Mr Breadsell laughed, and it was a tight smile she gave him back. She wouldn’t have been sure whether he was laughing with or at her.

‘It wasn’t as good as I expected,’ she told us, in the lobby, when I pressed her for better than ‘different’, but she couldn’t say anything too terrible since it was a movie she’d wanted to see.

‘Well, I’m away to sort a few things,’ she said, taking a plastic rain hood out of her bag and tying it carefully over her head. It was still pouring, and I knew she didn’t have a car so I offered her a lift home. She looked torn between the prospect of a dry ride back and whatever errand it was she had to run.

‘When are you going?’ she asked.

Now. Of course now. Or soon? ‘Maybe twenty minutes?’ I said, and Meg looked surprised. What were we going to do for twenty minutes?

‘Aye, alright then,’ Lily said. ‘Where will you be?’

I had no idea. We’d made it outside and were standing under the awning, out of the rain. Across the street was the Pink Fig Café, a fluorescent sign flashing Open in its window beside a Have You Seen poster of little Jessie Else and a chalkboard mostly undercover, on the footpath, advertising coffee and cake. ‘There.’ I pointed. ‘We’ll be in the cafe.’

‘Right,’ said Lily and marched off down William Street.

Meg was fiddling with her plastic bag, unrolling the neck of it then rolling it back up again, her woolly hat pulled low and a worried look on her face.

‘My treat,’ I told her. I would have linked my arm through hers to buck her up and reassure her, but I thought it would be too close and confronting, so I was surprised to feel her tug on the back of my jacket as I stepped off the kerb. It wasn’t a busy road. It didn’t need clever timing or a break-out into a run. It was only William Street, but she held on all the way across, like a child. For all Meg’s independence and self-sufficiency, there was something stunned and unsure about her, like a little bird that had flown into a window.

The following week, Meg was standing in sunshine beside the car as usual at ten to ten, and away to the side stood Lily, in a skirt and matching cardigan. She was shifting from one chunky shoe to the other, twisting her watch then looking at it and up and around like she’d lost another balloon.

I knew the part I was supposed to play. She’d pretend a taxi hadn’t come, and I’d say, ‘Do you want to come with us?’ She’d apologise and offer petrol money and I’d say, ‘Don’t be silly.’ She was irritating with her What caravan? and Pleased to meet you (even though we’ve met) and Fancy seeing you here (though I’ve never been before), but what did I want her to say? I’m lonely. Can I please spend a couple of hours with the two of you? It would have been cruel to push her all the way to honesty, so I waved and called across, ‘Are you going in to town?’ and she came with us to Muriel’s Wedding.

She was ballsy, I’ll give her that. She didn’t wait for me to ask her if she wanted to come with us the next week; she just turned up. I made sure she took the back seat, so Meg would know she hadn’t lost her place beside me. Lily took the third ticket and was the last one into the row and first one out at the end of the movie, but she was welcome.

The movie we saw that week is still one of my favourites: Only You. It was A Love Story Written in the Stars, according to the poster, and we all floated out with tissues in our fists and smiles on our faces. When Mr Breadsell asked the women in front of us how they’d liked it, one said it was an absolute delight and the other one told him she’d liked it almost as much as Sleepless in Seattle, but when he asked Lily, she actually snorted, ‘If only life were like that!’

‘Well, I suppose, deep down, we all believe in a little magic, don’t we?’ Mr Breadsell smiled, but Lily pursed her lips and shook her head as if the whole idea disgusted her. She’d have been the one to rip back the curtain on the wizard in Oz.

I wanted to talk about it. Ask her what was wrong with a little magic. Why couldn’t life be like that? And even if it never was or would be, what was wrong with dreams-come-true endings?

‘Are either of you in a rush to get back?’ I asked, and they looked at each other before shaking their heads in unison. There was still a bit of Do you want to? Shall we? Why don’t we?, but I hooked Meg’s arm through mine, and we crossed William Street and took the table by the window in the Pink Fig.

We went every week after that. We sat at the same table and took the same chairs around it, Meg facing the door and jumping ever so slightly when the little bell above it jingled; Lily with her back to it, not caring who or what came in; and me between them with a clear view out of the window. The waitress came to know our order—two cappuccinos and one black coffee with cold milk in a jug on the side (‘I’d rather add it myself, please’). We had whatever cake came with the special, though every week Meg waited to find out what it was before she nodded her order, and Lily would say, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound,’ though I never really knew what that meant.

I’d come to enjoy Meg’s quiet company, but I enjoyed Lily’s conversation too. It was clear she’d been a long time without much of it. She made us laugh. Not that she was trying to be funny; she just grumbled all the time and rarely had a nice word to say about anyone or anything. Tom Hanks looked a simple sort, Mr Breadsell ought to tidy himself up a bit, and Jessie Else shouldn’t have been wagging school in the first place. Service was scrappy, cups were filthy, cakes were a bit dry, but she knew when to keep quiet. She never questioned which movie was screening, she pretended not to see the junk strewn on the back seat of the car, and she never, ever spoke even the mildest of harsh words to Meg.