No matter how many times she went through Saturday's job ads, Sacha couldn't find anything that suited. Eventually, when the light had faded so much that her eyes could no longer adjust and she was forced to get up and flick the light switch, she decided to give up on the newspaper. She went to bed and slept through the night: sometimes deeply, sometimes fitfully, always wearily.

She woke up the next morning, Monday, with a determination to go into the city and canvas her C.V. around some of the businesses, small and large alike, that lined the shadowed streets there. It was nothing she hadn't done before: by her recollection, she'd undertaken just such an activity on at least three previous occasions, and each succeeding time was marked by greater desperation and less pickiness in the businesses whose doors she opened. She hadn't kept a record of where she'd already left her C.V. and where she hadn't, but now she figured that if anywhere received a second copy of her C.V. it was probably to her benefit. She wondered, cynically, how many of the copies of her C.V. had been filed, and how many had been binned. She estimated the number that had been binned - without any real basis for the guess other than her own growing pessimism - and calculated how much she had spent on those copies, adding the 15 cents per sheet of paper that it cost her to print them at her local internet café - plus additional costs for computer time, of course.

She always had a folder full of copies of her C.V. ready to distribute. In the last four months it had become habit - it had become habit with depressing ease, Sacha thought to herself, and she went through the motions of picking up the folder, slipping it neatly into a bag and walking down the stairs from her flat to the ground floor, out through the gate and down to the tram stop. The world was like a haze: the details were adrift, at one remove from her mind - or vice-versa.

There was nobody else at the tram stop; everyone was at work, Sacha supposed. The tram came in a few minutes and she got on. She diligently bought a ticket, pressing the buttons mechanically and feeding her carefully counted change into the slot. Another $3.10 deducted from her savings, but she could afford it more than she could afford to risk a fine.
The tram rattled like a slow electric impulse into the city; Sacha gazed disinterested out the window at the passing shops and tried not to think of the embracing Brindabella Mountains whose shadows she'd grown up under in Canberra. The horizon here was so different, when she glimpsed it between the buildings: it just stretched into low grey smudges of cloud in the distance, and it was so flat.

After about ten minutes the tram arrived in the city. Sacha got off at the corner of Spring and Collins Streets, to work her way west to the other end of the city centre. The tall buildings rose on either side of Collins Street, reminders of the city's growth in the gold rush that she'd studied in 19th-Century history classes at university. It was all alien to Sacha: this scenery, herself standing in the dark streets with a thick wad of C.V.s in her bag, trying to sell herself to whoever would accept her. The comforts of home had never seemed so distant. She straightened her back proudly, pushed her glasses up her nose, and pushed open the glass door of the nearest office building.