I loved Brunswick, the long low-ceilinged gloom of Barkly Square, the narrowness and busyness and length of Sydney Road, and further things that were personal and not based in measurement. But how difficult it was to get anywhere from Brunswick; you had to own a car, like Lachlan, or a bike, like also Lachlan, or have a job and take Ubers and sometimes cabs (like Dan), or you had to date Lachlan or Dan.

How far would Dan realistically go, if he found one of my index cards and was meant to seek revenge? Of course to Parkville, Coburg. But Richmond? Even there? It was just one suburb over from his workplace in Abbotsford, but I knew how exhausted he could get after work, and vengeance was famously all-consuming.

This was a live issue on this bright December day, because I had decided to hook up with the person who had given me a ride to Fitzroy on the last night of November, and he lived in Richmond, beyond the jurisdiction of the index cards. It was eight days after the pool, and in that time I’d been thinking increasingly sexy thoughts about Vivian. This made me want to rid myself of Vivian in the traditional fashion, but because it was a Monday morning the only people online were other students (yuck!) or guys who had gone out on Friday night and were still awake, using little icons of crystals and clouds to identify themselves.

My car-driving friend explained that he’d taken this Monday off work, at a call centre, and wondered if I’d like to come over and hang out. I saw right through this ingenious sex code. It was bright and cloudy, which put me in an adventurous mood, but no mood is adventurous enough to go from Brunswick to Richmond on the necessary mixture of buses, trains and trams.

The problem was solved by Lachlan, through no knowledge of his own, because he and Dan had driven inland to a music festival and taken off the Monday to give themselves a long weekend. They had driven to this festival from our place on Friday afternoon and left Lachlan’s gorgeous bicycle tucked under our stairs.

It was a chromium monster, with hot tyres and real heft. When the stranger said Richmond, he did not mean the Abbotsford edge – this was just before the river, where the land begins to crest. I heaved the bike up the hill. My pits were soaked with sweat.

My new friend in Richmond was living in a silvery apartment block that was chunked with rainbow boxes, modern, cheap and fun, but right across the road was a yellow-brick apartment building with a messy leafy garden, fewer units, wide windows.

The stranger lived alone, which was a dream of mine, and his own stark tinted window faced the busy road, leaving the bed to occupy a zone of his studio that was windowless and permanently dark. We lay down with our clothes on and I knew that I’d messed up. We didn’t really know how to touch each other properly; we lay on our sides, propped up on one arm, sort of lazily batting each other’s chests and stomachs.