‘Thanks,’ he said, thumbing it into his phone. ‘I’m into it. You’re cute.’

I seized in place.

‘I’m what,’ I said.

Full quiet. He said, ‘Cute?’

I wanted to spit on the floor. Instead I ran downstairs, retrieved the bike, did not look at the windows; but as I’d left the room, his voice had come chasing behind me: ‘You make me want to explore my sexuality,’ he’d said.

I rode and rode and rode the bike. I had to get back to Brunswick.

I did not look back.

Literally all I’d done was something other than what he expected, and was there a universe in which this was resolved by Vivian re-evaluating the prevailing conditions? No, I was cute; something liked but not admired. And I made him want to explore his sexuality, which was bad for several reasons, and all of them were worse. No one in their right mind wants to explore their sexuality, all you’re going to do is run into something mangy, better left untreated and unfed. It was a crazy thing to tell someone, dangerous even, so unbelievable as to be genuinely egregious.

I rode suicidally, which is hard to do on Canning Street, with its wide lanes and nature strips and student picnickers and considerate drivers and strong civic ideals, a perfect place to close your eyes and ride.

When I got home, I was met with the familiar sounds of Dan in the kitchen, busy with the preparation of some post-festival meal, and so I snuck the bike silently back under the stairs. This was easy, for Lachlan kept his bike, and all things, serviced to a noiseless state of unsqueaking zoom.

‘I just flew here from Richmond,’ I said, ‘and boy are my arms tired.’

In making this stupid joke, I had given the game away, because no way would Dan believe I’d caught public transport to Richmond and he also knew what my bank balance looked like. But Dan’s focus was elsewhere. He was bent over the sink, his hair limp and stark, and his hand was down his throat, pulling up oozy wet ropes.

‘Dan,’ I said, laughing, and moved towards the sink.

He held a hand up, but I kept coming. He did one of those vomity wipes that succeeds only in drawing extra, sticky vomit from further down the throat, creating a wide, solid-seeming web of spew between the fingers. He cleaned it off, but some ropes hung there stubbornly.

‘Good festival?’ I asked him.

‘Allegedly.’

His eyes were spidered red. While I had been riding through Richmond, failing to compromise various principles that I could not defend, Dan had been driving home from the music festival with Lachlan’s friends, a healthy group of professionals-in-training, two of whom had decided to spring a wedding on everyone, first luring them to a roadside stop that seemed green and normal, but quickly turned out to be filled with relatives and cake.