Sacha arrived at the bar at the appointed hour in the full expectation that Hannah would be late. Nonetheless, she couldn't bring herself to be anything other than on time: call it pathological, but she just hated to be late for anything. Even if it meant waiting.

Watching the Saturday traffic slowly drag down Brunswick Street, she expected Hannah to be very late indeed: only a few weeks ago Sacha had been watching from a tram stop as a tram inched its way down the narrow, crowded road: only a few hundred metres, and it took it several minutes to make the distance. She watched a tram now do the same thing, but at least the slow-moving traffic made it easy to cross the road. On reflection she didn't know whether Hannah would be riding the 112 down Brunswick Street or the number 96 down Nicholson Street - the latter would make more sense, coming from Brunswick where Hannah lived (Sacha could not understand why Brunswick Street passed through the heart of Fitzroy and never went anywhere near Brunswick itself) - but it was Hannah, she could be coming from anywhere.

There were no outside tables at the bar at which Hannah had insisted they meet: a concession to the season, perhaps, but the day was warm and intermittently sunny - as had been the three days before it - and Sacha would have enjoyed sitting outside. Instead she was forced to push open the stiff door of the bar and enter the gloom within.

It was a stylish gloom, to be sure: dim red lights illuminated the corners and plush chairs and sofas loomed from the dark floor like rocks from an ocean - but it was gloom, all the same, and Sacha had enough gloom in her flat without seeking it out. That was one of the reasons she wanted to move out: the electricity bill for lighting alone was putting sizeable dent in her bank balance.

She went to the bar and ordered a glass of orange juice - she didn't like to drink alcohol before dark except on special occasions - and sat down in a chair which gave way and started to envelope her. She was reminded briefly of an old episode of Dr. Who she'd watched in her childhood, Kate cowering behind the sofa of their parents' house, before the chair finally settled into shape and she began to relax into it, because the chair offered so little support that any stiffness in her was punished by quickly accumulating pain. The whole place made her think of Hannah, for some reason - and not just because it was she who had arranged the meeting: it just seemed so like her. Her kind of place. Do I know her so well already? thought Sacha incredulously.

She looked around, watchful as ever of her surroundings: there were a few other people in the bar, not quite a crowd, not quite a gathering. They were all hunched in hushed and private conversation while music rustled softly in the background. The barmaid - there only seemed to be one - busied herself wiping down the bar, lifting bottles and other containers up one-by-one to wipe a cloth underneath them. The place was very quiet, almost strictly quiet: it was like a library, thought Sacha - a library with alcohol.

She heard the strike of a match, and turned her head: when she'd been a very little girl her mother had told her not to stare, but nowadays she stared - and glared - whenever she thought there was due cause. The blue smoke of a hand-rolled cigarette seemed, to her, to be an invitation for an angry glare - but the man who'd lit the thing didn't notice. He was too busy talking, flirting, with a much younger woman who was seated next to him. Sometimes Sacha liked the anonymity of being one person in a city of millions; sometimes, she didn't.

She heard the door creak open, but lost in thought she barely paid it any heed. But she was shaken out of her daydream when she heard a low, soft voice say warmly: "Sacha!"