Greta caught Tuberculosis from her elderly neighbour. Doris had called her one Saturday, desperately ill with what she thought was the flu, and begged her to clean her house.

Being a person who firmly subscribed to the old adage of Love Thy Neighbour, Greta cooked and cleaned for Doris, unknowingly breathing infected air and touching infected surfaces and, a week later, Doris was dead and Greta was infected.

Greta sat recovering in hospital for three weeks, and when the immediate danger of infection was deemed to have passed, she was allowed to participate in a craft therapy program.

The kit she initially selected was a needlepoint picture of a posy of violets, but the woman running the program shook her head and handed Greta a few pieces of brown leather, an embossing tool, and the various other supplies it took to put together a leather bag.

‘It’s called a messenger bag,’ said the woman. ‘Once you’ve made it, write down something you want more than anything else in this world, then fold up the piece of Paper and put it inside. When you look inside and find the paper gone, you’re wish will have come true.’

‘What sort of hooey is that?’

The woman shrugged and took the other kits with her, so that Greta was left with no choice but to create an ugly, boxy bag that she’d never wear. When she finished it, she found that she rather liked its colour, after all – it was the colour of her childhood horse’s saddle.

She tore off a piece of paper from the stationary set her husband bought her, wrote down her wish, folded the paper and put it inside the bag. When she looked inside the bag one Sunday morning two months later, the paper was gone, and she had an explanation for all the chundering she’d been doing lately.

Greta presented her daughter Lucy with the bag on her wedding day, having told her its story every day of her life. Lucy, being a modern, no-nonsense woman, nodded and smiled and stored it in the back of her wardrobe, where it stayed until her daughter, Rhonda, dug it out in pursuit of easter eggs.

Greta told Rhonda the story of the bag, much to the chagrin of Lucy, and Rhonda instantly believed it. She carried the bag everywhere but, following her grandmother’s instructions, didn’t make a wish until she was in her twenties.

‘It only has one good wish in it every couple of decades. I don’t know how I know that, I just do. Your mother wasted hers, but there is no such thing as a roll-over, so you better make your wish count.’

At twenty-eight, Rhonda had not even the faintest inkling as to what she wanted. She had a great career, a house that was halfway paid for, and a girlfriend, Jane, whom she adored. She wanted for nothing.

The same could not be said for her neighbour, Jim. He wanted one thing and one thing only: Rhonda. He had been sneaking into Rhonda’s yard, mowing her lawn and waiting in front of her house for her when she came home every night to tell her he loved her ever since he moved in six months before.

Rhonda had ignored it at first, then asked him nicely to stop, but when she found him trimming her hedges at eleven o’clock one night, she lost it.

‘You need to stop this. And stop telling me you love me. It makes me uncomfortable. I have a girlfriend. Thank you for all you’ve done, but it ends now, okay?’

Jim nodded.

‘Okay.’

He pocked up his hedge clippers and Rhonda watched him all the way home before going inside and locking the door. When she woke up the next morning – which was, coincidentally, her birthday – and smelled bacon frying, she thought Jane had a special day planned.

She knew this was wrong when she almost tripped over Jane’s body in the hallway. It was Jim who had decided to make her breakfast, which Rhonda realised with horror that he must have intended to serve to her in bed.

Rhonda went back to the bedroom, wedged the door shut with a chair, and took the messenger bag and a stationary set off the dresser. After all those years, she was suddenly, deeply aware of what she wanted more than anything.

Five minutes later, the sound of raised voices and three loud cracks echoed down the hall from the kitchen. Rhonda looked into the messenger bag.

Her note was gone.