Eventually Sacha had to stop pestering Hannah about her relationship with Shelly. Although she didn't doubt that Hannah would happily talk about it all night if given the chance - it was all Sacha could do ordinarily to stop her gushing - Sacha felt bad about taking so much interest. It wasn't healthy, she thought. It wasn't good to get her kicks from listening to stories of somebody else's relationship. She needed to stop being so reclusive, she told herself. She needed to get out there for herself instead of listening to other people do it.

She also needed to stop sounding like her mother, she reflected with a little bittersweet amusement. Though if she was sounding like her mother, then her mother had a point. At times like these it seemed strange to Sacha that she hadn't made more friends in Melbourne. Strange in an anthropological way: she was almost able to observe herself as if from a distance, as if it wasn't her life but some other woman's who she'd been studying for so long that her life had become intimately familiar. But then she was snapped back into herself when she tried to decide what she'd do that night. In general she'd like to read more, but it was so much easier to switch the T.V. on and watch the night slip away hour by hour: 7:30 to 8:30, 8:30 to 9:30, 9:30 to 10:30, and then it was time for bed, if she was going to be awake at work tomorrow.

It was almost like she'd made a conscious decision to stop meeting people, as if she'd reached some kind of threshold and declared: "Enough!" She'd assumed she'd meet new people at work, when she first started there, but that hadn't worked out. Or rather, it hadn't happened the way she'd hoped it would. One problem was that she was the youngest person at her work by some margin - well, there'd been another girl there when she started but within a couple of weeks that girl had left to go on a 'round-the-world trip for an unspecified period of time. Didn't see herself coming back to the job. Didn't say so at the farewell party. Didn't seem sad to leave. So she'd left, and left Sacha alone with a horde of middle-aged business-men and women, the kind her grandfather had always called "city types", with some measure of contempt. Her grandfather had a lot of contempt for a lot of things, actually. Sometimes deserved.

It wasn't true though, Sacha assured herself, that she hadn't met anyone else since she'd met Rona and Hannah and co. She'd met all those people at the Word on the Street, for starters.

Well yes, she answered herself, but only in the way a cat meets another cat if they're both living in the same house. It doesn't mean they're friends. Doesn't mean they're going to get along.

Oh come on, she countered, some of them were all right. Take Phillip, for instance.

Phillip? Phillip was a dweeb!

Sure, the first time. Not the second time, though. Not when Rona had set them up.

Well, that was true. He'd gone overseas, too. Worked out well for him, evidently.

Don't' change the subject. Why didn't you ever call him back?

I don't know.

It's not too late.

Not too late for what? What are you saying?

Not too late to call! Stop making a drama out of everything. Don't you wonder why you never meet people? You never follow through on anything!