On Friday night, on the 'phone, Sacha's sister had told her to treat it just like any other job interview. On Monday afternoon, when Rona's editor had called her, he'd said all he was doing was inviting her in for a friendly chat. On Tuesday morning, when the time to depart for that "chat" finally came, Sacha was undecided.

She washed her hair twice as thoroughly as normal, dried it, wrapped it up in a towel to dry it some more, let it hang down to her shoulders, tied it back in a ferociously tight ponytail, let it out again just a little so that it looked more casual. She tightened the screws on the arms of her glasses so that they didn't wobble around quite a much as they had been lately. She gazed at herself quizzically in the bathroom mirror, drew a streak of lipstick across her mouth, wiped it off, put it back on again less severely. Despite her sister's insistence, she was damned if she was going to put on any more make-up than that.

She found a blouse to wear, one that she hadn't worn for a while - then she found a jacket to put over the blouse and hide the stain that she'd forgotten about and which was the main reason why she hadn't worn the blouse for a while. She put on a skirt, then decided that it made her look like that damned supernanny off the T.V. and replaced it with a pair of jeans. They looked slightly odd with the blouse and the jacket but she also kind of liked the casualness of them and decided that that might work to her advantage as she imagined she'd be sitting down: she'd look casual when she was walking into the editor's office, serious and business-like when she was sitting and the jeans were hidden behind what she imagined would be the editor's large desk. That was how she pictured the interview - or whatever it was - in her mind. If she'd thought about it in any greater depth she would have realised that such a scenario, at a tiny street magazine, was a little unlikely. But despite all her down-beat expectations when Rona had called her the previous week her excitement about working on the magazine had by now got to such a peak that her head was a whirl of thoughts which rushed by so quickly that deeper analysis was beyond her.

She'd received a text-message, quite unexpectedly, from Hannah that morning: "good luck gorgeous love hannah" it had read in its entirety, and the surprise of it had a prompted a broad grin from Sacha for the first time in weeks. But it didn't occur to her that Hannah might have gone to the effort of waking herself up much earlier than was her usual habit just so that her text-message would reach Sacha in time; and Sacha hadn't had time to reflect on it: immediately after she'd got the message she'd started hurrying to get herself ready. Not that there wasn't plenty of time, but she didn't want it to look like she'd been hurrying to get ready.

Well, now she finally was ready. She adjusted her hair one more time, touched up her lipstick, decided to do up the buttons of her jacket (just to make extra sure the stain on her blouse was hidden), and then she was out the door.

She was in again a moment later to get her shoulder-bag-which-was-not-quite-a-handbag, and then she was out again.