‘Should’ve thought carefully before you encouraged me to go out into the world,’ I said. ‘Never know who I might bring home!’

‘You haven’t brought anyone home.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I said. ‘But if I did, we could go on double dates with Lachlan and Vivian. That wouldn’t be so bad.’

‘I guess we’ll never know.’

He put his head on my shoulder.

‘Merry Christmas,’ he said.

Later that night, he caught a cab to Lachlan’s.

This all suggested a universe of hazy chance and split realities, a dark sea of occurrences both known and never-thought, spiralling to their nocuous conclusions.

The substance of post-Christmas week was appreciably less thrilling: Dan wanted me to come to Lachlan’s for a dinner party. The novelty was that this would be a weeknight dinner, which was traditionally challenging for a salaryman to host.

I was nervous, partly about seeing Chris L but mostly about seeing Dan in this much-feared apartment, which I had not previously been invited to. I stood in Dan’s empty bedroom to take advantage of his luxuriously person-height and person-wide mirror, spat in my hand and smoothed my hair. Some people shook, sweated and wet themselves when nervous, so I guessed I should be grateful that in a time of need my body unleashed only this eerie automata, this spitting and smoothing, hairstyle tics.

My youth allowance had clicked over into another fortnight, although we were entering a terrifying badland where public holidays did weird things to scheduled payments and it was both necessary and impossible to prepare for this. I walked up to Black-hearts on Lygon Street and bought a nice bottle of rosé, which was beading by the time I disembarked the 96 and descended into Fitzroy, really Collingwood, because their building was at the top of Oxford Street.

In the late afternoon light – which in summer was just daylight – the industrial façade of Lachlan and Chris L’s building looked stately and warm. Balconies had been bolted to the brick exterior and residents had filled them up with green things in large pots. I buzzed in and walked to the elevator, very quickly, never having been there but at some point having learned that the body corporate was cracking down on ‘loiterers’ – visitors. Up here on the third floor, a large black door flung open.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ said Lachlan.

I took a deep breath. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Dan’s being unreasonable.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said.

Dan had always laboured under the false belief that he was wonderful at hosting, when in fact he couldn’t multitask; the sight of two burners, burning low, could make him bloodthirsty. If he had to coordinate more than one cooking timeline, he was liable to snap a spoon and stab you.

But what nice drawers held the wooden spoons in this Fitzroy apartment! Lachlan had led me into the kitchen, lean and dark, and the drawers themselves were lean and dark, wide and deep and stark, a pan of tofu perched above them, bubbling.