‘So you shamed a gay person. It’s not hard,’ Dan said. He leaned against the windowframe. ‘You don’t get a prize.’

‘Shh,’ I said. ‘It’s not fun.’

But it was fun, and perfect. Just a single guy and another guy gossiping about boys!

‘Do you want some wine?’ I asked him.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘It’s late.’

‘It’s very late,’ I said. I looked out at the park. A wide net, a dark deep. A place of free-growing night plants and oval-crossing strangers. But they were in the distance, and Dan was here with me.

‘I’m done with men,’ I said.

He climbed out and joined me in squinting into the dark.

‘Maybe,’ he said spookily. ‘But they’re not finished with you.’

PART 2

INTO THE UNKNOWN BUT CHOSEN

The difficulty of the fray
lies in making
the crooked
straight
and in making
an advantage
of misfortune.

Sun-tzu

There were men in the world, and they were not finished with me. I pictured plots and rituals, complex fibs and schemes. Madwomen in the attic, fake identities – the kinds of fates inflicted on people in all the novels, on women and, sure, maybe some Russians, so why not on me?

This wasn’t how I wanted to go down. But Dan said, ‘No, you drongo.’

It turned out this had been a needlessly alarming way for Dan to tell me he’d formally committed me to a New Year’s adventure at a beach house to which Vivian had ‘access of some kind’; unspoken was the idea that his parents owned it, just as they owned his squalid but valuable apartment in Richmond.

It turned out we weren’t even going for New Year’s Eve, when the house had long ago been booked by internet strangers; instead we had it for the night of December 30, and we’d drive back to Melbourne in the morning.

The next day, Dan showed me the listing on his phone.

‘Ooh, inlays,’ I said, hoping he wouldn’t scan down towards the descriptive passage where I had learned this word eight or nine seconds ago.

‘Those are very interesting,’ he said.

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

It was mid-century modern, full of rectilinear teak and fussy mid-century furnishings. Everything was polished, blond and red. Downstairs, a ‘mess room’ looked crammed with single bunk beds, each of them tucked under low ceilings, exposed beams. I pictured the kinds of parties they must have had there in the fifties: the proud host and hostess sleeping in the room upstairs, the last gin fizz after a long night on a wide deck, and then stowaway persons, descending those stairs, drunk and giggling; and nowadays, dead.

It’s the new year soon, so my Richmond friend had said. Meaning what exactly? If you aren’t careful, you’ll get stuck being the same old you? Sadly, I could only be so lucky.