Cirrus@Austlit

'It’s been three years since Roxanne had sex. For the first six months, it had been funny. Sitting with Rita and Linda in cafés on Brunswick Street, in the city, in Collingwood, she’d thrown her arms up in the air and said things like ‘Six months, I mean, what the fuck is that, right?’ And they’d all laughed, as if there was something exciting and even naughty about not having sex in six whole months. By that August, she was shocked to realise that she’d been making the ‘six months’ joke for a whole year. ‘Twelve months’ just didn’t have the same sound as ‘six months’. At the end of eighteen months, she stopped talking about it altogether. When the topic of sex came up, as it invariably did, she sidestepped, laughed, said ‘not as frequently as I’d like’ or something equally inane, and moved the conversation away from herself.'  (Introduction)

'Just before I turned forty, my mother, who was the only other member of my family still alive, died from a stroke. She left me a small amount of money, enough for a deposit on a semi in a suburb that was not too far from the city, a place where the streets were hilly and treeless, and the houses that hadn’t been knocked down to build huge brick villas remained unrenovated.' (Introduction)