Sacha eventually had to excuse herself from her sister's conversation: she was meant to be working on her second column - the "difficult" second column, as Rona had joked; though Sacha was unsure how much she actually had been joking. Sacha didn't tell Kate about it: writing a column for a street mag just didn't seem like something she'd do, and she didn't feel like explaining to Kate why she was doing it. Apart from anything else, she didn't know herself quite why she was doing it, other than that she somehow found it impossible to say no to Rona. Her sister, she knew, wouldn't believe this in the slightest.

Rona, for her part, had a nagging pulse at the back of her mind which was her reminder that Sacha's next column was due, and due soon - but it was just part of the larger headache that was her weekly ordeal of putting the magazine together. She should have guessed, she thought despairingly as she remembered the number of spelling error's she'd corrected in a two-hundred word review the previous day, that "assistant" editor would turn out to be a misnomer.

She wondered at times why she did it: putting up with Si and all his bullshit, haranguing hapless writers and trying to persuade them to write for the Word on the Street instead of one of the numerous other street magazines that might actually be able to pay them something. It was like a training ground, she told them: somewhere relatively stress-free (for them, anyway) where they could hone their writing skills. And get free tickets and C.D.s, of course: the freebies were also good.

As she thought this it was Tuesday morning and she was carrying a shopping bag full of C.D.s to a tram stop near her house, where she intended to make a short trip to a local second-hand record store in which she was such a familiar face that the young man who was always working there whenever she went in had been on the verge of asking her name on several occasions. She'd spent a good amount of time the night before carefully peeling off the "review copy only - not for sale" stickers from the covers of the C.D.s, and now she had a good bunch of C.D.s which she hoped never to hear again but which were otherwise fine. Someone would pay for them. There was always a market for any old crap.

Sure enough, the same young man was behind the counter when she walked into the shop. "Oh, you're back again!" he said cheerily, as if he hadn't been expecting her. She just nodded, and smiled wanly at him as an afterthought, and generally behaved as if she didn't know pretty well by now precisely when he worked and when he didn't.

"What have you got for us this week, then?" he asked as Rona placed the bag on the counter. He picked out a C.D.: the debut (and probably last) album from the latest custom-made boy-band. "Aww, you're parting with this?"

Rona snorted with involuntary laughter: there was something in the young man's tone of voice. But still she stayed cool. "I've got a few others here, too" she said. The man smiled. Secretly, he liked having to work for her attention, and he'd found himself feeling pleased whenever he saw her come into the shop. He wouldn't mind knowing her name at all, he thought to himself.

But he didn't ask - it seemed like too much of a formality. Instead he just picked through the dozen or so C.D.s Rona placed on the counter, looked them over scrupulously as if they might be scratched (although he knew perfectly well by now that they'd all be perfect), and quoted Rona a price which she duly accepted - as always - and then he wished her, with a smile, a nice day.

"Thanks" said Rona, and lifted the empty bag off the counter. She allowed the smiling young man a glimmer of an upturned mouth, and turned towards the door. She pushed the it open, and then was stopped dead by a sudden thought: she shook her head. "Oh, fuck it then" she decided against her better judgement. She let the door fall shut again, turned to face the man, and asked him:

"Do you wanna come to a gig next week?"