I wait for my friend Kate on a plastic chair at the Greyhound bus station. I am certain she will be late. She’ll stride up with steps ringing like a child’s percussion instrument and say, I couldn’t find my way out of the bloody place.’ Or: ‘They have orange shirts for two dollars in the shop across the road.’ I pick at the coffee stain on my pants. I imagine her looking the way she did at nineteen, when we made ourselves sick with bourbon. She styled her hair with spray-and-wipe into a kind of skyscraper punk look. We listened to all the bad Australian music we could find and she said, ‘I can’t stand myself.’ Greyhound is playing tinkly love songs on the radio in their waiting room, perhaps to take their customers’ minds away from fears of sparrows splintering through windscreens, or hijacks, or lost bags and unexpected delays.

Kate is first out of the bus station, lugging her suitcase against the weight of the closing automatic doors. She is thinner than I had expected, and her face looks set, pinned-on like the shapeless dresses our mothers sewed for formal dances when we were in school. She is talking almost before she sees me, ‘Absolute hell … I’m too old now … my bones feel like they’ve been crunched through a grinder … they played Paul Kelly like we didn’t know where we were going,’ and her boots click on the slippery lino. I feel caught out, as though I had run into an ex-boyfriend at the local store and I was wearing tracksuit pants, and he had another girlfriend on his arm. I thought of the broken strap on my shoe and the plastic bag of laundry that was shaking in my left hand. I should have put on lipstick.