SIDNEY STEPPED out of the Southern Cross station florist with a mixed bouquet wrapped in pink tissue. The heat felt almost solid now.

Trudging towards the office reminded her of John Brack’s painting of Collins Street. In school, the blank-faced office workers and grey city buildings reproduced in the Handbook of Art had seemed alien to a small-town girl. Now, glass towers had replaced Brack’s 1950s sandstone buildings. Not all the faces were white, and mobile phones were stuck to ears, but the blank expressions were the same. Strange now that here she was — that girl grown up — in the street, in the picture, in the book. Her past self in the future. Or her future self in the past? Or the present? Thoughts like that — time plains, continuums, illusion — could do her head in; she shook them off as she crossed King Street.

The few bunches of flowers had grown into an ocean blocking the footpath from just past the Anpat-Enlaw building to William Street. The aroma of blooming and rotting was suffocating. Too much colour. Foil balloons were deflating, candles melting. Here a soft toy, there a chalk message of love and peace scrawled on the concrete. Sidney looked up as a tram swept past, an advertisement for the new horror movie Cleave plastered along the side: an attractive woman’s face in a broken mirror. Tamsin has two distinct sides. Be sure to stay on the right one. Sidney added her bouquet to the pile and headed up to work.

On level ten, the stainless-steel door to LOC loomed: Sidney’s reflection rippled like a disturbance in still water. Welcome to the funhouse. She swiped her pass. Inside, the glass and unnatural light was excessive. Sunglasses would have been a good idea, but she didn’t want anybody thinking she’d gone mad again.

Waiting for her computer to start up, she changed her shoes.

‘Sidney.’ Ros swivelled her chair. She was wearing a rose-patterned tent. ‘Could I see what you’re working on?’

Sidney opened the file — a business-admin learning resource on communication in the workplace — and leaned to one side so Ros could see her screen.

‘Print it out, please, so I can have a proper look.’ Ros lifted her glasses, rubbed at the indentations on her nose, and replaced them.

Sidney sensed Dee and Dave holding their breaths. She glanced at the ceiling and sent her document to the printer. Ros uncapped a red pen as Sidney brushed past on her way to the copy room.

She returned with the document and stood with arms folded as Ros corrected her work, striking out any whiches without parentheses, and replacing them with thats.

Excruciate was a word that made Sidney think of snails on salt, bubbling over with slime: excruciating (verb). She felt like a snail.

‘You’ve almost got the hang of it,’ Ros said with a thin smile: two worms stretched above her chins. She smelled of Dioressence, like Nan used to wear — old-lady violet and rose — and leaked urine on deodorised panty liners. Dark yellow.

Sidney snuck a look at Dee, who was shaking her head.

‘Just pay more attention to the style guide in future, please.’ Ros handed back the papers.

Sidney’s hands felt heavy as she sat at her desk. The words in the assessment section of the resource swam on her computer screen. You must complete all five questions successfuly before moving on to the next section. Successfuly was spelled incorrectly. Successfully? Sucessfully? Sucsessfully? She couldn’t think. Her hands, her arms, and then her whole body was expanding, inflating like a balloon, but filling with cement instead of air. The outlines of objects started to melt; the colours within separating into dots like a Seurat painting. You knew this would happen without the meds. I knew. She knew.

No. It would pass. She just had to breathe from her diaphragm and count, and she wouldn’t explode, would eventually shrink back to normal size, the colours would reassemble inside their outlines, and she’d be able to reach the emergency Valium in her handbag. ‘The Heaviness’ and ‘The Melting Colours’ were more likely symptoms of a panic attack than psychosis. The less fear she showed them, the less power they would have over her. Aimi had explained that anxiety meant you were too much in contact with reality; psychosis occurred when you lost touch with it. Sidney had a checklist of symptoms that ‘weren’t psychosis and not to be afraid of’. But when the colours didn’t go back together and other things happened, that was psychosis, Aimi.

Stop! It’s OK. It’ll pass. Please, please stop. Breathe, don’t cry. Don’t excruciate.

Aimi had taught her to calm down by describing five things she could see, hear, or feel.

One. I can see a plane tree. It’s dying in the heat down on the street. There’s a dent in its trunk — perhaps the truck hit it. The leaves are shaped like the ones on the maple tree in the yard back home at Broken River Road, but they were the colour of blood, and the plane tree’s are tree-frog green.

Two. I can see the building across the road. A bank that looks more like a Gothic castle. Carved sandstone and marble, lancet windows. Four stories, maybe five — it’s hard to tell where one ends and the next begins. A gargoyle watches from the rooftop.

Three. I can hear one of the project managers on the phone to his wife. Did he say ‘Love the fuchsias’ or ‘Blood in mucous’? From his tone, someone in his family has cancer. Please don’t let it be their new baby.

Four. I can feel the little silver buckles on my shoes trying to bite my feet and —

Move your body. She stood and marched on the spot.

She couldn’t remember which number she was up to. I can see the top of Ros’s head. The roots of her burgundy hair are white. It’s almost time for her to waddle across to the coffee shop for her midmorning cappuccino and croissant.

Should have been you instead of the baby. She shoved the thought away as soon as she’d formed it.

She felt the eyes of the pod on her as she marched, but nobody said a word.

Eventually, Dee said, ‘Cup of tea?’

‘Spiffy,’ said Dave.

Queen Ros and Knave Myffy were in the tearoom holding court with middle management about their previous adventures editing cookbooks together. The queen laughed like a constipated hyena and the knave nodded enthusiastically.

Dee and Dave were choosing biscuits from a plate at the other end of the island bench. Arj was by himself at the table, eating a muffin over a newspaper, crumbs falling onto the headline: Failure of mental health services blamed for Collins Street tragedy.

Sidney’s hands shook as she made a cup of tea; the Valium hadn’t kicked in yet.

‘Coming for lunch?’ Dee said. ‘We’ve found this great Malaysian place that has terrific lunchtime specials, haven’t we, Dave?’

Dave nodded, his mouth full of biscuit.

Sidney remembered she hadn’t eaten breakfast, but said she wasn’t hungry.

‘You’re fading away,’ Dee said. ‘We’ll bring you something back.’ She proffered the biscuits to Sidney. ‘Chocky ones today. We must have been good.’

‘No thanks.’

Sidney glanced at Ros and her posse, and took her tea back to her desk.