Broken by Ilsa Evans

twisted and she sighed, quietly. It was going to be a long, long wait.
    She had no friends.
    This realisation came to Mattie as she sat at her kitchen table with the Centrelink paperwork spread out in front of her. Her interviewer had been kind and very helpful but, in the end, Mattie elected to take the paperwork home and return it the next day. So, over the past two hours, she’d filled out her details and answered the questions with a steadily growing feeling of humiliation. Not that she hadn’t expected to part with a fair degree of personal information to be granted a payment, but the nature of some of the questions left her with a sense of vulnerability and dependency very similar to the one she was trying to escape. However, she was well aware that at the moment she had no room for false pride – she needed this money and she needed it soon. So she worked up and over her resentment, and forged ahead. Until she reached the end and discovered she needed third-party verification of the fact that she and Jake were no longer living under the same roof.
    While one part of her was acknowledging the reasonableness ofthis requirement, another part was cringing as it methodically evaluated potential referees. And crossed them off. As most people do, she had a number of acquaintances meandering through her life, and they crossed paths with a smile and the occasional chat. There were several couples they’d met through Jake’s work, like the Dixons and the De Silvas, whom they’d have dinner with once or twice a year. And there were the much older Carsons, next-door neighbours for the past eight years who occasionally passed some home-grown vegetables over the fence and stopped to discuss the weather. Then there were the other mothers at the primary school, with whom she exchanged pleasantries, or sat next to during extra reading each Monday morning, or did canteen with once a month, and those, such as Rachel and Ginny, who shared a humid hour with her every Monday afternoon as their children learnt to swim at the local indoor swimming centre.
    But none of these people were real
friends;
rather, they gathered around the periphery of her life, giving it the appearance of fullness without the actual substance. And she paled with embarrassment at the thought of approaching any of them to verify her separation. So what did it say about her life that she didn’t have a single person of whom she was comfortable enough to ask this sort of favour?
Hi, do you mind signing this for me? Let’s have a coffee while you do. White and one, isn’t it?
Not a single person.
    Where had they gone?
When
had they gone? Because once she’d been surrounded by such people. Friends who she could drop in on unannounced, or ring for a good long chat, or meet for a leisurely lunch.
Mattie! Of
course
you can come in. In fact, I was just thinking about you!
For starters there were her three ex-flatmates, all so close at one stage that they’d shared clothing, and baths, and far too many bottles of cheap sparkling wine. Jude had married a navy guy, whose particular job kept his family up at the top end of Australia, while Paula accepted a job promotion that took her to London about six years ago. But didn’t either of them ever come back for visits? Or the obligatory births, deaths and marriages? How was it that these two women, once so much a slice of her existence that she knew what brand of sanitary products they used, now just formed part of her Christmas card list rather than her life?
    And there was Liz who, as far as she knew, still lived in the innercity area, only about three-quarters of an hour away. Yet the last time they’d met was at Liz’s wedding, about five years ago, when she’d wed her long-time partner, Alan, an athletic type whose life was dominated by footy in the winter and cricket in the summer. He and Jake, whose idea of a relaxing evening was bound up either with computer