Thursday passed for Sacha in a flurry of 'phone calls to various houses, making appointments or occasionally finding out that the room had already been taken (surely it wasn't asking too much for an ad to be taken down once the room had been filled?). The whole process of trying to find a new house was - to use a cliché Sacha particularly detested - an emotional rollercoaster. Right now, she was up; or at least, as up as she would allow herself to get. Not that she was unnecessarily pessimistic, she kept insisting to her sister Kate (who knew better, but preferred to humour Sacha): she was just realistic. "Chin up, though" Kate had said before hanging up on their 'phone conversation the previous night. (This was closely followed by: "And don't forget to call Mum and Dad once in a blue moon!")

Still, the market seemed to be quite healthy at the moment: there appeared to be a large number of houses with rooms available, and though Sacha preferred to stay near where she was currently living simply because it was what she was familiar with, Sacha wasn't really fussed about it. At the same time, she was cautious about the risk of overloading herself: she didn't get as much exercise here in Melbourne as she had in Canberra, and this had been combining with the uncertain weather patterns of the city to give her immune system a bit of a battering. It was hardly going to help her if she topped that off with an exhausting schedule of house interviews: she couldn't find a place to live if she was lying in her sick-bed.

Fortunately, any enthusiasm she'd had about looking for a new residence had quickly dissipated within the first three flats she'd gone to look at, back before she'd decided to concentrate on houses instead. Now that she'd made that decision, it might be reasonable to assume that the enthusiasm would return - but she couldn't muster it. She remembered all too well what the experience had been like earlier in the year: an endless parade of dead-end options; smiling and false sincerity and trying to out-smart people who she aspired to one day live with. Remembering this was fortunate in that it kept her from getting too carried away with the making of appointments for interviews.

Really, she hated the process. Not so much because it was exhausting, but because of that mindset of psychological warfare that she had to get herself into in order to perform at her peak: bending the truth to please the people she was talking to, choosing to withhold certain information that might shine an unfavourable light on her. In short, deceiving people that she was supposed to be impressing. It was even worse on those occasions when, by chance or by mismanagement, she had turned up at the place at the same time as another prospective new housemate: there would be polite smiles and small-talk, of course, but lurking beneath it all was the brutal awareness that this person is the competition - and so she (or they) would take any opportunity to show that they were the better option to the people showing them the place: by wiping their feet with exaggerated care and deliberation; by squatting down to extravagantly pat the resident cat or dog before the other person had a chance to do so. She hated it.

She wiped her nose on the back of her hand; she resisted a sneeze. Don't get tired out, she told herself forcefully. Too late, though: she could feel a cold coming on, she was sure of it.