Free An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire

the bar to order, but as soon as they got back to their tables they dropped the act. It was like, ‘How you doing love?’ in almost a whisper, but then ten seconds later yahooing with their mates over fuck knows what.
    It did hurt a bit, if I’m being honest. I’d known many of them all my life. Janie, who’d been my best mate all through primary but then went off to the Catholic school in Year 7. Her husband Mick, who wet his pants in kindergarten and was a swimming champion in his teens and who almost died of meningitis a few years back. Patrick, who was my kind-of-boyfriend when I was fifteen and who later married wall-eyed, stuttering Jenny, who we all tried hard to like in high school because she was the only person we knew with a pool. Mr and Mrs Creighton, who lived next door to us when we were kids and who I’d never in all these years seen inside the Royal.
    At one point this woman I didn’t recognise came up and rubbed my arm and started talking like she was my dearest friend. It took me until almost the end of the conversation (though it wasn’t long – just her asking how I was holding up and me saying fine and then asking how she was) for it to click that it was Fiona Willard, who told everyone at the Year 6 dance that I was wearing a dress her older sister had donated to the Salvos the previous week.
    Very late in the night one of the regulars, Lynn, said my name and looked into my eyes, properly into my eyes. I almost started bawling right then, because I didn’t realise until that second that nobody had done that all shift.
    â€˜Listen, love,’ she said. She was seventy-three, a widow, came in every night looking like the Queen, drank her body weight in gin and left looking like an unmade bed. ‘Listen. You shouldn’t be here.’
    â€˜It’s fine,’ I said, trying to brush her off, because, seriously, I was going to bawl.
    â€˜No. Listen. The papers said they don’t have a clue who done it. So it could be anyone. It could be any of ’em.’
    My belly filled with ice water. It could be any of them. The men I’d been serving drinks to, taking roast dinner orders from, telling I’m holding up okay. I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it myself. I don’t know what I was thinking or why in those days. Jesus. It could be any of them.
    I’d not kept whisky in the house since the awful night a couple of weeks after Nate left when I drank a whole bottle and Bella found me the next morning sleeping in my own spew. That was the lowest moment of my life and I promised Bella I would go easy from then on, only drink beer when I was home alone. She would have preferred I didn’t drink at all, but she was realistic and understood about harm minimisation. We made a deal about spirits in the house and I’d kept to it ever since.
    That third night that I knew Bella was dead I brought home a six-pack of beer and a bottle of Jim Beam. I drank one beer, one slug of bourbon, one beer, one slug of bourbon until there was only bourbon and then I kept drinking straight from the bottle.
    I needed noise and distraction, but was scared of news breaks coming on the telly or radio, so I put on an old JJJ Hottest 100 CD. I pulled out my photo albums and looked through them all. I cried a lot. When I got to the wedding album and saw Bella, just a kid still really, but looking like a goddamn model in her pale pink satin mini, and me in my white slinky cocktail dress and there was Nate, one big hand on each of our shoulders, I nearly choked with the sobbing. I tried to call him but got his voicemail. Fuck knows what I said, but I said a lot. I think it was mostly about Bella, but it was possible I mentioned how sick I thought it was that he was up there fucking some other bird when his wife was down here grieving for her baby sister. It’s very possible.
    I woke in the middle of the night, still sprawled on the floor in front of