Don Barlow was home alone, watching the evening news, when he heard a knock on the door. Glancing at the copper clock on the wall, he saw that it was getting close to 8 pm, which wasn’t late in the normal scheme of things, but Don wasn’t expecting anyone, and 8 pm was still late for unexpected visitors.
Maybe not when you’re young. But as much as Don didn’t want to admit it, he was no longer young, which shouldn’t be taken to mean that Don thought of himself as elderly either, because who ever does? Maybe when you’re in your nineties you’ll say it proudly, but Don was only a few weeks shy of seventy. In any case, he rose from his armchair and made his way down the flattened carpet of his big old house by the beach in Bondi, thinking it would probably be Malcolm’s wife from next door, maybe with a dual pack of toilet paper under her arm, or else a pump bottle of sanitiser to give him.
But no, when Don looked through the peephole, he saw a much younger woman, more like a girl, and one he didn’t recognise, at least not immediately. She wasn’t facing the door, the way people normally do when they’re waiting for someone to open up; she was standing side on, looking back over her shoulder as if to make sure nobody was watching her. She wasn’t wearing a face mask or gloves. She was wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, and a pair of skinny jeans…
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