"God, I need to do something like that" Rona said when Hannah told her about Sacha's indoor soccer, next time they talked on the 'phone. Then she realised: "Hey, what are you doing ringing me up? You should just come over. How long would it take you - ten, fifteen minutes?"

"Twenty maybe?" Hannah said, looking across her room to the recently warm impression on her bed left by Shelly; the rumpled sheets she hadn't yet forced herself to smooth out. Shelly had gone home: she had to work tomorrow.

"Come over" Rona said. "I feel like I haven't seen you in ages. I mean actually seen you."

Hannah had been avoiding Rona ever since Rona's break-up with Matt. It was what she tended to do whenever things got a bit difficult, emotionally. She believed in suffering in silence; actually, she believed in not suffering at all, and that if there was suffering to be done then she didn't want anything to do with it. But she couldn't say not to Rona for long and Rona was right, it had been ages. "I'm on my way" she said.

Half an hour later she rang Rona's doorbell. She was holding a cask of wine in her other hand. She rang the bell again and again until Rona, sensing something, came exploring down the corridor and opened the front door just in case, just as Hannah was about to ring the bell for a fourth time.

"Hannah, you know there's not a share-house doorbell in the whole of the inner-north that actually works" Rona chastised her. "Come in, come in. Miranda's working late tonight and the house is creepy and quiet. What's that you've got?"

"Just Chateau Cardboard" Hannah said apologetically. "Your local bottleshop is pretty shit, Rona."

"Which one did you go to?"

"The one on the corner."

"No, no, no, don't go to that one. There's another one . . ." Rona trailed off. "Don't worry about it. Let's open it."

They walked down the corridor to the sitting-room. "Still no housemate?" Hannah asked.

"We're too picky" Rona admitted. "And we've got used to stretching our money to get by. We need to start looking properly but - god, it's just so horrible. Everything about it is horrible. It's horrible looking for housemates and it's horrible looking for a house."

"How long's the lease on this place?" Hannah asked.

"Another few months. Then we go month-to-month. Which is good and bad, I guess."

"Yeah, good luck with that" Hannah said, noticing a crack in the sitting-room wall. "The landlord might wanna fix this place up some time. What's that, thirty days notice?"

"Sixty, maybe" Rona said. "Why are we talking about this? Let's not talk about this."