After the protest had finished Sacha quickly made her way back to Fitzroy, to her flat. She had no desire at all to linger in the city: the bars were already starting to fill up with the Friday-night, drinks-after-work crowd, and steady streams of people wearing football jerseys were parading through the city toward Spencer Street and the stadium. Sacha had never taken much interest in Australia Rules Football - in any football - but it was odd how the abstract identifiers of each team now, suddenly, resolved themselves into locations she could place, suburbs she could visit if the mood took her: Carlton; Essendon; Richmond; St. Kilda.

By the time she got home it was almost 8:30, and like the city Brunswick Street was already starting to fill up with the slowly churning crowds of Friday-night revellers who plunged into Fitzroy afresh each weekend: she was starting to realise that Fitzroy on a Wednesday night, say, was entirely different from Fitzroy on a Friday. Hoards of young men - boys, really, most of them no older than eighteen it seemed - clogged the pavements, strolling slowly up and down from bar to bar, looking for fights or looking for girls, looking for anything that came their way. Sacha was determined that it wasn't going to be her - true, she could snap a man's ego in half with a few well-placed words, but lately it was more effort than she cared to expend. When she got back to her flat she cooked a lacklustre but filling dinner and went to be early, and read until she fell asleep, the book splayed upside-down on her bed-cover, at 2 a.m.

In Brunswick, Hannah's hair was spread like a black halo across the pillow of her bed. Janine was sitting on the edge of the bed, smiling hopefully down at Hannah, and circling with her fingers the buttons of Hannah's coat, which Hannah was wearing even indoors because the inside of her house was colder than the outside. Janine asked her, quietly, lovingly, if she would be too cold without it. Hannah laughed, her teeth gleaming from within her wide-open mouth and the back of her hand resting across her forehead as if in a swoon: she wasn't swooning, but she and Janine had reached the bottom of the bottle of wine and with that following on from the joint she'd smoked earlier Hannah was beyond caring. She sighed, and Janine slid her hand down to the next button. She didn't care for Janine, couldn't stand her most of the time, wanted only to get rid of her - but not now. Now Janine had a role to fulfil. True, it was a role that Hannah could perform herself - had, would, without hesitation - but whatever. Either way, she wasn't too fussed, and having somebody else there made a reassuring change. Janine's hand crept further down, and carefully, quietly, she lay down next to Hannah and kissed the palm of Hannah's hand, and when she kissed Hannah's lips, her eyes shut, Hannah laughed again, low and rumbling, as if to a private joke, the corners of her mouth upturned sharply beneath the weight of Janine's lips.

Not so far away, Rona was listening on headphones to a C.D. she'd received earlier that week. She was meant to be reviewing it, if not now then some time soon, but she found it impossible to concentrate on the music. It was too depressing, and depressing music was not what she wanted to be listening to. If her housemates hadn't been asleep (on the one hand) and studying (on the other) she would have put on another C.D., something jubilant, and danced through the house, cooked everybody a meal even though everybody had already eaten, and got riotously drunk and regretted it not a jot the next day. In her pocket she had a piece of paper with a 'phone number, the name of a bar, a date and a time, all written in a handwriting that was alien to her. It was all she could do to prevent herself from pulling out the paper and staring at the black, painstakingly neat script - that would be so childish! It would be the dreaded high-schoolish behaviour she'd ridiculed earlier in the evening, on the 'phone to Hannah. Well, damn it, she thought, if now wasn't the time for immaturity she didn't know what was. She pressed "stop" on the C.D. player, changed the C.D., pulled out the headphones and turned the volume up high. Her housemates would have to forgive her.