"Rona's kind of odd" said Sacha, quite unexpectedly. "It seems to me."

Hannah stroked the bowl of her wineglass. "How d'you mean?"

"Just - she's so . . . obvious. Wait, no, I don't mean that how it sounded -" The wine had started to get to Sacha, and she could feel her face flushing. "What I mean is . . . You always know she's there. You can't deny it, she's got a . . ."

"A presence."

"Yeah. A presence. But then she's hiding all this stuff. Well not hiding. Well, fuck you know what I mean."

Hannah smiled. "Yeah, I can see what you're getting at." She finally gripped her glass firmly and knocked back a mouthful of wine. She was starting to think about getting a second glass - it was dark inside the bar so it may as well be night-time, and night-time was time for drinking. "The thing about Rona"she said, "- 'Cause I've known her longer than you, so I know a thing or two. Thing about her is, she lives for her friends. Just lives for them. So all that talking and badgering and organising and fucking everything she does, it's not about her. It's about everyone else. But when it comes to herself . . . Well she keeps it close to her chest."

Sacha thought about this. Her brain wasn't feeling quite up to the task of moving smoothly from one thought to the next, so she said abruptly: "When you first met her, is it true you were hitting on her?"

"Fuck yeah!" Hannah reclined back in her chair, her eyes wide with cheeky enthusiasm. "Little goer like that? How could I resist!"

"Too bad she's straight, huh?"

Hannah paused for thought. "You know what? I don't think so. That night, I wasn't out for anything more than a bit of fun. I probably would have got bored of her in a couple of days, if anything had happened. But now she's pretty much my best friend instead. So I'm kinda glad she's straight. If that's what you want to call it" she added as an afterthought.

"Is that all you do, then?" asked Sacha. "Get bored of people?"

Hannah sighed, and looked at Sacha carefully. "Some people" she said slowly. "But not everybody." She winked, and it made Sacha smile. After a moment Hannah continued: "So tell me about your relationships, then. What's your history? Tell me all about your boyfriends."

Sacha pushed her glasses up her nose and glanced quickly, wonderingly, at her wine. She was too tipsy by now to deny Hannah's request. "There's really not much to tell" she said, truthfully. "I went out with a guy for a while at uni. He was kind of nice, a bit dull but kind of nice. I had a date for my formal, I think."

"You think?"

"Pfft, high-school stuff. Who can tell what the hell's going on." Sacha took another sip of her wine. "Hey!" she said suddenly. "What do you know about this bloke of Rona's?"

"'Bloke'?" Hannah giggled. "I dunno, he's just some loser who works at the video store or the record store or something. Why?"

"Just curious."

"Well you could ask her next week, word is she's going in there to sort him out."

"Really?"

"Uh-huh."

"Huh."

They both settled into a comfortable silence, their focus thrown off by the wine in their blood. Outside the afternoon slipped quietly by, and Hannah got her modest wish: she forgot, for the moment, all about Janine.