It was definitely a thing you heard more and more about, the effect carrying a phone everywhere had upon humans. She’d heard on a podcast that scientists were already recording a change, for the worse, in global sleep patterns – even among people who switched their phones off for the night. Just the presence of the devices created a sort of subconscious twitchiness, an unease. It was a product of the slavishness which the world had wandered into; of the mental pattern established by checking a single device hundreds of times in a day. Asleep or awake, the brain reached insatiably for the phone.

Still, it was amazing what they could do, you had to admit it. Right now, Sal could see from the screen that it was twenty-five degrees – beautiful early autumn weather, although she had never got used to thinking of the seasons the wrong way around. She could see, if she opened the relevant apps, the stock markets, a range of sports scores. Neither finance nor sport was a big interest of hers, but she found it useful to have a bluffer’s knowledge of both, as she did with a huge range of subjects. If she flipped on to WhatsApp she could follow the excited chatter of three of her mates who were organizing a trip down to Lorne for Easter. The chief organizer was unemployed, so the build-up to this three-day holiday had become her major undertaking in life: she’d set up the chat group as early as Christmas and it had now produced more than a thousand messages in total. Sal rolled her eyes indulgently at the latest dispatch. Still so pumped for April, girls! What was Bridget going to do when it was all over? She’d jump in the river.

You didn’t need a phone, of course, to see that it was a glorious day. The sky, over the dashing art-deco façades of Bourke and Collins streets, was a confident blue, Australian blue. Weekend shoppers were out; in rooftop bars, weekend drinking had begun already. Some people would find it weird going into the office, doing promo, building up to a big speech, on a Saturday. Melbourne, even more than other cities, reminded you at every turn it was fun time: crowds flocking to the stadium, rowing boats slicing their way upriver. But Sal didn’t mind it at all.