Lachlan took my too-warm wine and poured some for the two of us, then led me to the dining room, where I complimented him on his collection of large abstract prints and red-stained wooden furnishings, everything dramatic and cosy. I had not previously associated Lachlan with objects of this kind and was both stunned by their sophistication and designerly exactness and amused by how classically male and sophisticated they were, in a way that hung weirdly off a person in his twenties, unflattering and baggy like my only suit. There was also statuary and funky twisted lighting.

‘I assume it’s your statuary,’ I giggled. I was two sheets to the wind, having again raided our back-of-cupboard booze stock before tramming in, this time drinking a sticky orange liqueur.

‘No,’ he nodded placidly.

‘Chris L?’ I said.

‘Not his,’ said Lachlan.

‘Lachlan’s mad because Chris L won’t come out for dinner,’ called Dan. ‘He’s in the lounge room watching Foxtel.’

I was halfway annoyed that Lachlan hadn’t clarified things himself and halfway fascinated that he expressed his rage towards Chris L by neutrally explaining that certain objects belonged to neither of them. I sometimes wanted to like Lachlan. But he made it hard.

‘You guys have Foxtel?’

‘No, we don’t,’ said Lachlan.

I drew out the story like a breakable thread, hand over fist, delicate.

It turned out we were in the apartment next door to Lachlan and Chris L’s, which belonged to a couple, two gays, I could smell it, who had gone to the country for the Christmas period and needed somebody to look after their cat.

‘Therefore the dinner,’ said Lachlan.

‘We have to eat the cat?’

‘This apartment is three times the size of Lachlan’s,’ yelled Dan from the kitchen. ‘Also, these people have extremely handsome stuff.’

I reached across the table to pour myself more wine and was amazed to see that two thirds of the bottle was already gone. Lachlan’s glass was barely full, now it was full again.

‘The other night,’ he said.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘When you came out to the queer party.’

The last night of November. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Thank you,’ he said deeply. ‘It meant a lot to us.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

He looked at me across the table.

‘And when we walked away,’ he said.

I arranged my face into its most neutral shape. I’d forgotten this had even been a mystery.

‘It was a moonlit night,’ said Lachlan.

‘A moonlit night,’ I said. I could picture it. Every night was moonlit.

‘It was a moonlit walk.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘To Fitzroy Gardens.’

‘Yes?’

‘To the duck pond.’

‘. . . Yes?’

‘Dan took off his shoes.’

‘Yes.’

‘And a duck bit his toe.’

I stared at him – was that it? – whereupon he leaned back and crossed his arms and looked drunkly at the ceiling, I guess disappearing into moonlit reverie. I heard breathing and turned around, and there was Dan, standing in the throughway with an odd distant expression, lost in his own hazy late-spring memory.