THE DAY room resembled an airport lounge with the decor of a cubist painting: chairs and sofas, all mismatched colours, and geometric squares and rectangles with soft corners. The furniture faced a big television. The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was on. Patients — some in pyjamas and slippers, some in casual clothes — sat around smoking, or shuffled around smoking. Metal ashtrays overflowed.

A woman was cuddling a doll and talking to the pattern on the sleeve of her dress. A man was trying to eat an orange, but his hands were shaking so much it kept dropping into his lap. Another was banging his fist on a table.

The walls were the same custard colour as Sidney’s room. She couldn’t resist — she walked up and licked the paint.

A man in jeans and a Reece Plumbing T-shirt and cap offered Sidney a cigarette. She couldn’t recall if she smoked, but she stopped licking the wall and thanked him. He helped her light up.

Everybody in here was overweight — because of the meds, Reece explained. ‘Except for the anorexics.’ Reece was scrawnier than most, although he had a pot belly. He looked to be in his mid-thirties. His greasy brown hair hung below his cap. He told Sidney, in a flat monotone voice, that he’d been here since 1984.

That couldn’t be right. Surely nobody stayed in here for seven years.

‘In ’84, me workmates at the shop started persecutin’ me through the radio,’ Reece said. ‘Sendin’ out defamatory messages through the airwaves and stuff, and buggin’ me phone. The missus, the family, even me bloody neighbours were all in on it.’ He sucked his cigarette hungrily and exhaled smoke. There was a tremor in his hand. ‘Hey, Bill,’ he called to a big blond man in a turquoise transport-driver’s shirt. ‘Happy hour, mate.’

Reece told Sidney that Bill had rolled his truck over on the highway because he thought the Russian mafia were chasing him.

‘Maybe they were,’ she said.

Bill shuffled over — he had ‘Bill’ embroidered on the pocket of his shirt. He reminded her of somebody.

‘Do they have drinks here?’ Sidney said.

Reece’s mouth twisted slightly and he made a sound almost like laughter. ‘No. It’s meds time, love. We’ll show you where to go.’

‘But I don’t want any meds.’

‘Haveta. Or they force ya.’

She’d suspected as much, as Voices had quietened and her stomach had swollen since she’d been in here. She followed Reece and Bill to the glass-enclosed nurse’s station, where they doled out the pills.

Standing in line, Reece looked around conspiratorially, and placed something in her and Bill’s hands. She looked down. A lemon sherbet lolly, like a silkworm pupa in crunchy plastic. Her mouth was too dry to water, but her stomach rumbled, craving sugar.

‘Shh,’ Reece whispered. ‘Lollies are contraband in here.’

‘What happened to your hands?’ Bill asked. His voice had the same oddly toneless, but slightly too loud pitch as Reece’s, and his tongue moved around in his mouth as though it had a mind of its own.

‘Burned them when I set fire to my mum’s house, apparently.’ She blew a cloud of smoke into the air. ‘The Devil saved me.’

Reece nodded, impressed.

She tried to smile, but the muscles around her mouth were too stiff.