He meets her in August, that first time at least, outside an abandoned church on Bourke Street, her wiry body leant back to the wet brick wall. One more of those chilly August nights, it was a Sunday that first time, where the flavours of evening meals fragrant on a cool wind drift out windows into the night and red-brown, wet leaves slip and skid under the soles of his shoes. At the time he was thinking about something pretentious and blank like the comedy of romance. She smokes a cigarette, and coughs the smoke out, holds the pack and a lighter in her left hand. She's not yet ready for the night he comes into her life.

She wears tracksuit pants, old and thinned at the knee, hung on a jut of bone that sticks out above her waist. From behind he can see how gaunt she is and how the waistband sits just below the ridge of vertebrae at the base of her spine which he follows with his eyes until it disappears under the bottom of a grey singlet top. He notices how the pants drop straight at the sides over her narrow ass, flat and hollow, like a teenage boy.

'Thanks brus', a kid all pimples and odour, his arm full, eyes wide, grabs a bowl of watery soup and a spoon then moves back under the church awning. The queue shuffles one person on. The girl slides along the wall and turns her head toward the van, her face catching in the streetlight. He notices her vapid face, high cheekbones but sharp like blades under the fabric of her skin. Her thin line of a mouth, cracked lips, cheeks hollow like she's got the inside of each of them caught between her back teeth. Her hair frizzed and dry. Brittle like so many handfuls of spaghetti held over a pot and snapped in the hand.

David knows she's younger, much younger than she looks. He can tell by the way she moves amongst the others, always a foot back, always eyes darting. Lacking the confidence of age. He sees it in the way the others move amongst her, cautious and wary like she's still pumped full of the volatility of youth. Like there's something back deep in her eyes that flickers and glows and presents a risk. Something like the embers of life.

The queue shuffles one person on.

"Some coffee there bruva?" David says 'sure' and pours the brown liquid into a grey enamel cup, looks up at a man peering through slit eyes buried beneath a mess of matted brown hair and beard. He grabs the cup, not by its handle, but in his fist and flashes a smile, his teeth yellowed or chipped or dead.

The queue shuffles one person on.

He can see the crown of her scalp between the roots parted at the top of her head. She smells dry and powdery and shuffles nervously, staring at her feet, her hand open palm down on the van's bench. She notices it's a new man behind the counter but she doesn't think anything whimsical or optimistic about what shift a change might bring. All she does is notice.

'Hello there,' David says, angling his head in line with her eyes. Annie mumbles something he doesn't hear then jerks her head up like a whipped animal and mumbles it again.

"Sorry love, what was that?' David says his head now cocked sideways.

Annie opens her eyes and with them, catches his. She opens her mouth a third time.

'Gotny' apples?'

David sees for a moment a slideshow of sadness seared and played 12 frames per second on the back of her retina. 'Perfect' is what he thinks but of course, what he says is 'yes certainly'.

They dropped short of having sex that night. Instead, clumsy fumbling and scraping and scratching at genitals — him, out of practice and passionless. Her, suddenly self-conscious and feeling the pang of something hollow like a craving, like hunger, like panic. They do it, or don't do it, in a car park behind a house on Fitzroy St — frantic and hurried for a few minutes then slowed to a sudden halt like both minds simultaneously recognising the hopelessness of the situation and slumping back on the fence with a sigh. She lights a cigarette, scratches her arm — her fingernail catching on a hard scab of skin. He adjusts his cock.

Afterwards, he walks the stairs to his apartment stopping midway up the flight to listen to Fur Elise coming from a piano in the room next door. He only knows it because Sandra used to play it when all the family came to town every Christmas. Before she had her stroke. In the months that followed, as the builders filed in to install ramps and rails, they got rid of the household items that would only serve to remind Sandra of the thick wedge that now sat between her present and her past. What they should have done was sell the piano to someone miles away, not in the apartment next door.

David sees Sandra from the back sitting in the front room at the end of a cone of yellow light, the chair's rubber wheels clamped to the timber floor.

He grabs her gently on the arm, leans in and kisses her neck. Says 'night dear'.

He sees her again the following week. He volunteers on Thursdays because it gets him out of the house — gives him a night off. It's a clear evening this time and Annie stands against the wall wearing faded jeans much too big for her frame. She stares out across the road at the supermarket opposite, her gaze more fixed, head more settled. David notices that she lacks the edginess that comes to a junkie straight after a fix. Or straight before.

When she gets to the counter she says nothing but lets a faint grin slip across her face. She holds her hand open and in it, David pops an apple. He gives her a wink.

Later they find a spot behind a council bin on Crown and as they fuck, he thinks not of his wife or his guilt but of how perfect it is. They say nothing till it's done when she says 'what's your fuckin' name anyway'. He says 'John' but doesn't ask hers just says 'I'd better go'.

The next time he sees her is a Sunday — he's at a pub near Taylor Square with some mates. They've just come from a football game and are pushing soggy coasters around a table as they laugh into schooner glasses. David is laughing at something Roger just said about Don's new haircut when he sees her through the window outside. She's smiling and taps her knuckles on the glass till he looks up at her but just as quickly as he does; he turns his head back away toward the group and laughs again. He wonders if the group notices that he's not as present as he was a moment ago.

Annie wonders if he recognized her.