Sacha got off the tram and walked through the leaf-strewn and ramshackle streets of Fitzroy a couple of blocks to her flat; she pushed the heavy door to the building open and climbed the ringing stairwell to her own flat, bending down to pick up the mail from the doorstep before inserting her key into the lock and letting herself in.

The flat was warm but stuffy, and a little musty smelling. It had been raining when she left so she'd been forced to shut the windows in order to stop the rain from blowing into the flat. Now it had been waiting with the windows shut for about eight hours. She wondered if she was already putting too much effort into the magazine: she checked her answering machine, on the off-chance that one of the numerous companies to which she'd given her C.V. had called back. There were no messages there. She dropped the mail onto her kitchen bench. She had received in the mail today: an electricity bill, a catalogue for the local supermarket, and an offer of an American Express card.

Hannah, meanwhile, was settling into the long journey from Brunswick to Elsternwick. She tapped her Metcard absent-mindedly on the back of her left hand. The tinny rattling of music from somebody's earphones filled out the tram. She checked her reflection in the window: it looked as though she had dark bags under her eyes, but she couldn't tell if that was just an effect caused by the harsh fluorescent lights in the ceiling of the tram. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and hunched her shoulders warmly around her neck as a car full of nineteen-year-olds rushed past on the road outside. The same age as her brother. His birthday was coming up soon; she wondered whether he still remembered hers.

She remembered playing with him when they were kids: spraying him with a hose in summer, back when water seemed plentiful and the days were never too hot. Together they'd tried to make life a trial for their mother, who used to shout and smile at them in equal measure. Things changed one year when Hannah was seventeen, and word got back to her mother that she'd been seen kissing another girl. Hannah smiled ruefully when she thought about it now: by that age she'd been kissing girls for four years.

Her mother didn't see the funny side of it. After that she still smiled and shouted, but the smiling was a special gift reserved for her brother, who suddenly could not help but seem like the golden child in comparison. For along time Hannah only got the shouting.

Somehow she toughed it out for one and a half years. Then for her 19th birthday she gave herself a present: she moved out. Her brother by then was a fifteen-year-old, and surly as fifteen-year-old boys are; Hannah sometimes wondered these days whether she'd started losing his sympathy that day. But she wasn't thinking about him at the time, she was only thinking about herself and how she had to get out of that house.

Well, no, that wasn't quite true: she was also thinking about her mother, the woman who made no secret of her shame but, having lost a husband so early in her family life, would cling to her daughter despite all Hannah's "unnatural urges", as she called them. By moving out, Hannah would at least minimise the shame her mother felt. So that's what she'd done, and now she was travelling back to her old home, as she did a couple of times each month more or less, and everything would come bubbling to the surface again.

In Fitzroy, in her dark flat, Sacha put on the kettle and thought about when she'd next see her mother and father and sister and dog, and her home town.