Sacha started up the laptop, and smiled with amusement to herself when she heard the young dread-locked woman talking loudly and obviously to a friend about what a bitch she was, and how she was just like Rona. Sacha had forgotten how much enjoyment could be found in getting pissed off at people who truly deserved it. Speaking her mind, her mother called it: something she'd never been shy of.

Once the ancient computer stirred into life, the first thing Sacha did was check her email. She did it once a month or so - hardly anybody knew her email address, it was only something she'd set up years ago because her parents insisted on having some way to contact her when she'd gone overseas briefly before university. She logged in: 23 new messages. It was pretty easy to delete most of them: she didn't need a larger penis, nor did she have much use for discount Viagra. There were a couple of emails from her old university faculty: she really ought to tell them to take her name off their email list some time, she thought, now that she was no longer a student and no longer in Canberra. There were also two emails about a high-school reunion that somebody was planning. Fucking hell, thought Sacha: am I really that old already? Life seemed barely to have even begun, and yet here came nostalgia already. Well, she didn't have much use for it: high-school was not something she felt particularly nostalgic for. Most of her time then had been spent burrowed into the library, trying not to get involved in sports and trying not to talk to the other library-denizens, most of whom - even at that young age - she found insufferable. She'd had only a few friends back then, and she wondered what they were doing now. High-school reunion? No, she didn't think that would be something she'd be heading back to Canberra for.

Heading back to Canberra, though . . . It had been so long. The city had been clinging to life when she left: watered with rain that would bring forth verdant grass, only for the hope of it to be turned to dust and straw by the drought that refused to be shaken loose. Most of the bushland Sacha had walked through on weekend trips or longer had been burned, and wouldn't be the same again for twenty or thirty years. Yet . . . Reports from her sister told her that the city was improving, that the emerald-green Sacha remembered so fondly was more common, had come back and was lingering; that the eucalypts in the woodland scattered throughout the city were no longer hanging their leaves in weary resignation. That the strange birds that had fled into the city from the burned-out forests were staying, and flourishing. Sacha wondered how much of it was true, and how much was just hope and memory.

She could go back. She could go back any time, even just for the weekend. But money, she reminded herself: she didn't know how long her money might have to last, how long it would be before she would be offered a job. Plus she'd had vague thoughts of finding somewhere new to live, which would require money as well. Her parents, she knew, would be more than happy to pay for her to travel back, but she couldn't ask them to do that. And she certainly couldn't let them do it: her hard-won independence was too precious to her; precious and fragile, one concession might bring it crashing down. That, anyway, was how she felt: perhaps it was foolish, but if she didn't have her pride then what did she have?

So no, no nostalgia for her. She laughed slyly to herself when she heard the dread-locked young woman exclaim: "She's probably just using that computer to check her email, anyway!" - and Sacha had no doubt that in her place, that was exactly what the woman would be doing. Well then, thought Sacha, time to show her who's the better human being; and she settled into working on her column.