Sacha eventually managed to extricate herself from Rona's amiably dogged conversation and turned her attention back to the application form for the flat. As an afterthought, she turned off her 'phone: not that anybody really ever called her, and that was just how she liked it, but just now she really wanted to concentrate on the task at hand.

So she applied herself to the form, holding it flat against the wind with her left hand and thoughtfully scratching with a biro her answers to the various requests for information the form made of her. It didn't take long: she'd been more than half way through anyhow when she'd called Rona, and when she completed it she stood up from the bench and walked the twenty metres back to the real-estate agent's office. She managed a smile for the woman behind the desk because she supposed it'd look good, but it was hard to do: she detested the real-estate business and was inherently suspicious of agents (it was bias learned young, and like all such biases almost impossible to shake). Optimistically, she asked the receptionist if there had been a lot of interest in the flat: she couldn't imagine there had been, dingy little place like that.

"Tonnes" replied the receptionist.

Sacha's smile stuck to her face in a kind of polite grimace. "Okay" she said, "Well maybe I'll hear from you later." She left the office and stepped back onto the footpath outside. With a mixture of relief, despair and irritation she let the smile fall from her face. She couldn't begin to put into words how much she hated this process of looking for a new place to live.

She slowly made her way back to her flat, which now that she was planning on moving out seemed to be growing smaller and smaller by the day. The remarkable stretch of warm weather of the previous week - exactly what she'd expect at this time of year, if shed been back in Canberra - had been subsumed abruptly by a return to the heart of winter: rain blew on and off in screes across the streets, and clouds skittered across the sky, chased by a perpetually gusting wind. Occasionally the sun peered through a crack in the clouds, and thought better of it.

Nonetheless, the air of the city - or at least, the small corner of it Sacha confined herself to - was heavy with the scent of flowers. In her spare time - which, sadly, she had a lot of - Sacha had taken to walking through the suburbs of the inner-north: from her flat in Fitzroy, up to North Fitzroy, sometimes across to North Carlton or even as far as East Brunswick or Brunswick proper. Everywhere she went people's houses were adorned with great clumps of jasmine, like lion's manes or bushranger's beards. She'd noticed it, day by day, progressing from bud to bloom: the way the buds gradually stretched and lightened, red to pink to finally white before bursting open in a frothing sea of flowers. Jasmine-town, she thought. '

She was suddenly struck by a desire to have a garden. She missed summer evenings sitting in her parents' garden, reading a book with a glass of wine in her hand - or just idly chatting with her family, laughing over common jokes and shared histories. She missed greenery: she wanted to immerse herself in it, suddenly, desperately. Well she wouldn't be able to do that in a flat, that was certain. She realised that she couldn't settle for anything less than a house: she didn't ask for much, a little cottage would do, even if it was only one-bedroom. But she needed something more than just walls and lightbulbs: it was strange thought, that the outside of a dwelling was as important as the inside. But there it was, as if from nowhere. Well okay, she told herself, I won't settle for anything less than exactly what I want. It was wildly unrealistic, she knew that - but at least it was a push for happiness, for something more.