The next day Mal rang Rona to tell her all about the protest. "Were you there?" he asked her. "I looked for you."

"No, I didn't go" Rona said. She'd been struggling with whether to go to or not all weekend and had decided in the end to remain sedentary because it was easier; her regret now told her that it'd been the wrong decision. "It's too depressing" she said. "I'm trying to avoid depressing things."

"I saw your boyfriend there" Mal said.

"Ex-boyfriend" Rona corrected him.

"Shit, really?"

"We broke up" Rona said, redundantly. The words came out automatically, and while listening to the sound of them she wondered at what point she'd graduated from 'I dumped him' to 'We broke up'. Probably some time around the end of high-school, she figured. "Didn't he mention that?" she asked Mal, strangely feel hurt all of a sudden.

"Maybe he didn't want to talk about it" Mal said.

"Oh." Rona almost added 'Good,' but was it? Why? She didn't want Matt to be suffering, did she? Well, no, she reasoned, but she wanted to feel like she'd at least made an impact on him, at some point. It shouldn't be easy to break up with someone. But then hadn't that been the whole problem? "I need to get out" she declared. "I need to go see a band or a film or something, I need to get out of my head. What's on tonight?"

"Just go down Brunswick Street" Mal said. "You'll find something."

"God, I'm always going down to Brunswick Street. I need to do something different. And it's a hike to get down there now, anyway."

"So go do something different" Mal said. "You're in Melbourne!"

"Yeah, better do something before it all gets shut down."

"Hey, you know I just saw a poster of John Brumby, it said 'escaped mental patient'. It was pretty funny."

"They're gonna get killed at the next election" Rona said. "The Government. And then we'll have Ted Baillieu, god help us.

Mal groaned, and Rona guessed he was rolling his eyes too. "Man, I don't wanna talk about politics!" he complained. "They're all the same."

"Yeah, I really need to get out of the house and out of my head" Rona said again.